Multi-Robot Autonomous Exploration in Unknown Environment: A Review

Multi-robot collaborative exploration in unknown environments has drawn more and more attention, and the exploration algorithms can be well applied in many real-worlds applications such as search and rescue, underwater surveillance, space monitoring, etc. Despite much effort devoted to this field, the gap in data acquisition between research and real-world applications still poses big challenges that may hinder the development of this field. In this paper, we survey the current state of multi-robot exploration algorithms. We start by presenting the problem of multi-robot exploration. Then we review related work, covering a broad set of topics including policy selection, cooperation scheme, and communication, analyze the pros and cons of them, and point out some research directions to make them more applicable in real applications.