Cooperative Exploration for USAR Robots with Indirect Communication

To coordinate a team of robots for exploration is a challenging problem, particularly in unstructured areas, as for example post-disaster scenarios where direct communication is severely constrained. Furthermore, conventional methods of SLAM, e.g. those performing data association based on visual features, are doomed to fail due to bad visibility caused by smoke and fire. We use indirect communication (based on RFIDs), to share knowledge and use a gradient-like local search to direct robots towards interesting areas. To share a common frame of reference among robots we use a feature based SLAM approach (where features are RFIDs). The approach has been evaluated on a 3D simulation based on USARSim.