A Hierarchical Region-Based Approach for Efficient Multi-Robot Exploration

Multi-robot autonomous exploration in an un- known environment is an important application in robotics. Traditional exploration methods only use information around frontier points or viewpoints, ignoring spatial information of unknown areas. Moreover, finding the exact optimal so- lution for multi-robot task allocation is NP-hard, resulting in significant computational time consumption. To address these issues, we present a hierarchical multi-robot exploration framework using a new modeling method called RegionGraph. The proposed approach makes two main contributions: 1) A new modeling method for unexplored areas that preserves their spatial information across the entire space in a weighted graph called RegionGraph. 2) A hierarchical multi-robot exploration framework that decomposes the global exploration task into smaller subtasks, reducing the frequency of global planning and enabling asynchronous exploration. The proposed method is validated through both simulation and real-world experiments, demonstrating a 20% improvement in efficiency compared to existing methods.