Multi-robot Visibility-Based Connected Exploration
摘要
We study the problem of deploying |R| mobile robots to maximize visibility coverage in a polygonal workspace while maintaining a line-of-sight communication path to a home location. The environment contains opaque obstacles, and robots become stationary sensing nodes once placed. Each node exposes visibility frontier windows—open segments of the current visibility boundary—and available robots evaluate these windows to select the point that yields the largest incremental visible area. Robots bid their predicted gain, and a decentralized auction installs the highest bidder as the next stationary node, preserving a connected “min-link” backbone. The process repeats until all robots are placed or the environment is fully covered. We present the algorithm, its complexity, and communication requirements. Experiments on synthetic maps show rapid, monotone growth of visible area and effective distributed decision-making.