TopoExplore

The released Version of MR-TopoMap, the supporting open-sourced software package of the paper "MR-TopoMap: Multi-Robot Exploration Based on Topological Map in Communication Restricted Environment" submitted to RA-L and IROS 2022.

Our video is released at Bilibili.

Features:

• A multi-robot exploration framework based on topological map
• Only newly-built vertices and edges are transferred among robots, reducing the communication traffic
• An exploration strategy based on topological map, achieving higher exploration efficiency than Multi-robot Multi-target Potential Field (MMPF)[1] and Rapidly Random Tree (RRT)[2]

Platform

• Multiple cars with NVIDIA Jetson Xavier NX board, cameras and Lidar sensor.
• Ubuntu 20.04 (zsh)
• ROS noetic

Dependency

Cartographer

Cartographer is a 2D/3D map-building method. It provides the submaps' and the trajectories' information when building the map.

We slightly modified the original Cartographer to make it applicable to multi-robot SLAM and exploration.

Please refer to Cartographer-for-SMMR to install the modified Cartographer to carto_catkin_ws

and

source /PATH/TO/CARTO_CATKIN_WS/devel_isolated/setup.bash

Turtlebot3 Description and Simulation

(robot model for simulation)

sudo apt install ros-noetic-turtlebot3*
sudo apt install ros-noetic-bfl
pip install future
sudo apt install ros-noetic-teb-local-planner

Simulation in Gazebo

Installation

download the SMMR repo(https://github.com/efc-robot/SMMR-Explore), then switch to topoexplore branch and update the submodule

git checkout topoexplore
git submodule update --init

Build the project

catkin_make
source <repo_path>/devel/setup.bash

• Template

{env_size}      = 'small' or 'large'
{number_robots} = 'single' or 'two' or 'three'
{method}        = 'rrt' or 'mmpf'
{suffix}        = 'robot' or 'robots' (be 'robot' when number_robots != 'single')

BaseLine: Multi-robot Multi-target Potential Field (MMPF) and Rapidly Random Tree (RRT)

roslaunch turtlebot3sim {env_size}_env_{number_robots}_{suffix}.launch
roslaunch turtlebot3sim {number_robots}_{suffix}.launch
roslaunch {method} {number_robots}_{method}_node.launch

Test Baseline

For all the baseline cases, choose "Publish Point" button in the rviz and then click anywhere in the map to start the exploration.

Run TopoExplore

roslaunch turtlebot3sim {env_size}_env_{number_robots}_{suffix}.launch
roslaunch turtlebot3sim {number_robots}_{suffix}_origin.launch
roslaunch ros_topoexplore {number_robots}_{suffix}_topo.launch

References

1. J. Yu, J. Tong, Y. Xu, Z. Xu, H. Dong, T. Yang, and Y. Wang, “Smmrexplore: Submap-based multi-robot exploration system with multi-robot multi-target potential field exploration method,” in 2021 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE, 2021, pp. 8779–8785.
2. H. Umari and S. Mukhopadhyay, “Autonomous robotic exploration based on multiple rapidly-exploring randomized trees,” in 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, 2017, pp. 1396–1402.