Cart-O-matic project : autonomous and collaborative multi-robot localization, exploration and mapping
Résumé
The aim of the Cart-O-matic project was to design and build a multi-robot system able to autonomously map an unknown building. This work has been done in the framework of a French robotics contest called Defi CAROTTE organized by the General Delegation for Armaments (DGA) and the French National Research Agency (ANR). The scientific issues of this project deal with Simultaneous Localization And Mapping (SLAM), multi-robot collaboration and object recognition. In this paper, we will mainly focussed on the two first topics : after a general introduction, we will briefly describe the innovative simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm used during the competition. We will next explain how this algorithm can deal with multi-robots systems and 3D mapping. The next part of the paper will be dedicated to the multi-robot pathplanning and exploration strategy. The last section will illustrate the results with 2D and 3D maps, collaborative exploration strategies and example of planned trajectories.