Towards a communication free coordination for multi-robot exploration

Frontier-based exploration method are known to be efficient for multi-robot exploration systems. In this paper, we propose a novel, computationally inexpensive, frontier allocation method favoring a well balanced spatial distribution of robots in the environment. It is based on the computation of a position criteria. The position of a robot towards a frontier is defined by the number of robots closer to the frontier. Distances to frontiers are computed using a wavefront propagation from each frontier. The local minimum free potential fields, thus created, are also used for navigation achieved by descending the potential field gradient. Comparisons with existing approaches in simulation demonstrated the efficiency of our algorithm and experiments on robots validated the navigation method.