Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems: a Study of Vision-based 3-D Mapping using Information Theory

Rui Rocha, Jorge Dias, Adriano Carvalho

In Proc. of IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA’2005)
Barcelona, Spain, pages 386-391, Apr. 18-22, 2005.

Abstract

Building cooperatively 3-D maps of unknown environments is one of the application fields of multi-robot systems. This article introduces a distributed architecture, within a probabilistic framework for vision-based 3-D mapping, whereby each robot is committed to cooperate with other robots through information sharing. An entropy-based measure of information utility is defined, which a robot uses for communicating to its teammates the most useful measurements, thus preventing the robot to overwhelm communication resources with redundant information. Experiments with real robots, equipped with stereo-vision, yielded important conclusions about the way robots should cooperate on sharing information.

Index Terms — Cooperative multi-robot systems, 3-D mapping, entropy, information utility, communication.

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BibTeX

@INPROCEEDINGS(Rocha_et_al_05d,

AUTHOR = "Rocha, R. and Dias, J. and Carvalho, A.",

TITLE = "Cooperative Multi-Robot Systems: a Study of Vision-based 3-D Mapping using Information Theory",

BOOKTITLE = "Proc. of IEEE Int. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA'2005)",

ADDRESS = "Barcelona, Spain",

YEAR = "2005",

MONTH = "Apr.",

PAGES = "386-391"

)

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Last update: 14/06/2006