A Multi-robot Exploration Approach for Larger Maps with Unreliable Communications

The issues of limited communication distance and task capability are rarely discussed in designing multi-robot cooperative methods. However, these are important problems that cannot be avoided in practical applications. In this paper, simulation experiments are carried out on some task maps that are larger than the team's task ability. The effect of the dispersion of members on the team's task performance is tested, and the existing methods are improved by introducing long-range communication to auxiliary data sharing. At the same time, we use the calculation of Energy-Benefit to improve the task selection method based on the minimum distance to the target. Compared with existing strategies, the improved scheme performs better on communication-constrained large-map exploration tasks.