Multirobot Exploration of Communication-Restricted Environments: A Survey

Exploration of initially unknown environments is an online task in which autonomous mobile robots coordinate themselves to efficiently discover free spaces and obstacles. Several efforts have been devoted to study coordinated multirobot exploration assuming that communication is possible between any two locations. The problem of developing multirobot systems for effective exploration in the presence of communication constraints, despite its remarkable practical relevance, is comparably much less studied. The authors provide a taxonomy of the field of communication-restricted multirobot exploration, survey recent work in this field, and outline some promising research directions.