Mapping and Navigation for collaborating mobile Robots.

Abstract

Two modules of a software system for exploration and mapping using mobile robots have been created. The first module has the task of generating a map from the measurements of the robot, and the second module uses the map to navigate the robots in the environment. Additionally a simulator of the robots has been developed.

The mapping module was not able to deal with errors on the estimated pose of the robots which lead to inconsistent maps. When testing with the real robots the system managed to make the robots explore the whole environment, but that was mostly due to the fact that the test environment was fairly small.

The simulator showed a ability to very accurately simulate the behavior of the robots. It was used to further test the system without estimation-error. These tests showed that the system was able do distribute the robots throughout the environment and make the exploration quite efficient. However the navigation-module had some problems with detecting possible collisions, which somewhat reduced the performance of the whole system.