Entropy Based Multi-robot Active SLAM

In this article, we present an efficient multi-robot active SLAM framework that involves a frontier-sharing method for maximum exploration of an unknown environment. It encourages the robots to spread into the environment while weighting the goal frontiers with the pose graph SLAM uncertainly and path entropy. Our approach works on a limited number of frontier points and weights the goal frontiers with a utility function that encapsulates both the SLAM and map uncertainties, thus providing an efficient and not computationally expensive solution. Our approach has been tested on publicly available simulation environments and on real robots. An accumulative 31% more coverage than similar state-of-the-art approaches has been obtained, proving the capability of our approach for efficient environment exploration.

Collaborative Active SLAM: Synchronous and Asynchronous Coordination Among Agents

In the realm of autonomous robotics, a critical challenge lies in developing robust solutions for Active Collaborative SLAM, wherein multiple robots must collaboratively explore and map an unknown environment while intelligently coordinating their movements and sensor data acquisitions. To this aim, we present two approaches for coordinating a system consisting of multiple robots to perform Active Collaborative SLAM (AC-SLAM) for environmental exploration. Our two coordination approaches, synchronous and asynchronous implement a methodology to prioritize robot goal assignments by the central server. We also present a method to efficiently spread the robots for maximum exploration while keeping SLAM uncertainty low. Both coordination approaches were evaluated through simulation on publicly available datasets, obtaining promising results.

Active SLAM Utility Function Exploiting Path Entropy

In this article we present a utility function for Active SLAM (A-SLAM) which utilizes map entropy along with D-Optimality criterion metrices for weighting goal frontier candidates. We propose a utility function for frontier goal selection that exploits the occupancy grid map by utilizing the path entropy and favors unknown map locations for maximum area coverage while maintaining a low localization and mapping uncertainties. We quantify the efficiency of our method using various graph connectivity matrices and map efficiency indexes for an environment exploration task. Using simulation and experimental results against similar approaches we achieve an average of 32\% more coverage using publicly available data sets.

Active SLAM: A Review On Last Decade

This article presents a novel review of Active SLAM (A-SLAM) research conducted in the last decade. We discuss the formulation, application, and methodology applied in A-SLAM for trajectory generation and control action selection using information theory based approaches. Our extensive qualitative and quantitative analysis highlights the approaches, scenarios, configurations, types of robots, sensor types, dataset usage, and path planning approaches of A-SLAM research. We conclude by presenting the limitations and proposing future research possibilities. We believe that this survey will be helpful to researchers in understanding the various methods and techniques applied to A-SLAM formulation.