The robot exploration task has been widely studied with applications spanning from novel environment mapping to item delivery. For some time-critical tasks, such as rescue catastrophes, the agent is required to explore as efficiently as possible. Recently, Visit Frequency-based map representation achieved great success in such scenarios by discouraging repetitive visits with a frequency-based penalty. However, its relatively large size and single-agent settings hinder its further development. In this context, we propose Integrated Visit Frequency Map, which encodes identical information as Visit Frequency Map with a more compact size, and a visit frequency-based multi-agent information exchange and control scheme that is able to accommodate both representations. Through tests in diverse settings, the results indicate our proposed methods can achieve a comparable level of performance of VFM with lower bandwidth requirements and generalize well to different multi-agent setups including real-world environments.

翻译：机器人探索任务已被广泛研究，其应用涵盖从未知环境建图到物品递送。对于某些时间关键型任务（如救援灾难），智能体需要尽可能高效地探索。近年来，基于访问频率的地图表示通过引入频率惩罚机制抑制重复访问，在此类场景中取得了显著成功。然而，其相对较大的数据规模及单智能体设定制约了进一步发展。为此，本文提出集成访问频率图，该表示能以更紧凑的尺寸编码与访问频率图相同的信息，并提出一种基于访问频率的多智能体信息交互与控制方案，该方案可兼容两种表示。通过在多样化场景中的测试，结果表明所提方法能在降低带宽需求的同时达到与VFM相当的性能水平，并能良好泛化至包括真实环境在内的不同多智能体系统配置。