Entropy-based 3-D Mapping with teams
of Cooperative
Technical Report, ISR –
Abstract
One of the application fields of multirobot systems is cooperative mapping of an unknown environment. In this article, the problem of mapping an unknown 3-D environment is formulated through a probabilistic model based on information theory. Besides describing how such a map is updated upon new measurements, we use the map to estimate a spatial field of entropy and propose a gradient-based survey strategy which drives the robot to explore map locations having higher entropy (uncertainty). The single robot strategy is extended to a team of such robots which are committed to cooperate by sharing new acquired sensory information. We present an entropy-based measure of information utility which is used by robots to cooperate on building a 3-D map, without overwhelming communication resources with redundant or unnecessary information. The proposed framework is validated through its application to robots equipped with range sensors measuring distance information. Results from a set of simulation experiments on building 3-D coverage maps, with a single robot and with a team of cooperative robots, are presented.
Keywords — Cooperative multi-robot systems, 3-D
mapping, entropy, information utility.
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BibTeX
@TECHREPORT(Rocha_et_al_04,
AUTHOR = "Rocha, R. and Dias, J. and Carvalho, A.",
TITLE = "Entropy-based 3-\textsc{D} Mapping with teams of Cooperative Mobile Robots: a simulation study",
INSTITUTION = "ISR - Coimbra, University of
Coimbra, Portugal",
YEAR = "2004",
MONTH = "Feb."
)
Last
update: 20/06/2006
Copyright ©
2006 Rui Rocha, Dep. of Electrical and Computer Engineering,