Communication constraints can significantly impact robots' ability to share information, coordinate their movements, and synchronize their actions, thus limiting coordination in Multi-Robot Exploration (MRE) applications. In this work, we address these challenges by modeling the MRE application as a DEC-POMDP and designing a joint policy that follows a rendezvous plan. This policy allows robots to explore unknown environments while intermittently sharing maps opportunistically or at rendezvous locations without being constrained by joint path optimizations. To generate the rendezvous plan, robots represent the MRE task as an instance of the Job Shop Scheduling Problem (JSSP) and minimize JSSP metrics. They aim to reduce waiting times and increase connectivity, which correlates to the DEC-POMDP rewards and time to complete the task. Our simulation results suggest that our method is more efficient than using relays or maintaining intermittent communication with a base station, being a suitable approach for Multi-Robot Exploration. We developed a proof-of-concept using the Robot Operating System (ROS) that is available at: https://github.com/multirobotplayground/ROS-Noetic-Multi-robot-Sandbox.

翻译：通信约束会显著影响机器人共享信息、协调运动与同步行动的能力，从而制约多机器人探索应用中的协同效率。本研究通过将多机器人探索建模为分散式部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程，并设计遵循会合规划的联合策略来应对这些挑战。该策略使机器人能够在探索未知环境的同时，通过机会性地图共享或在会合点间歇交换地图信息，且不受联合路径优化的限制。为生成会合规划，机器人将探索任务转化为作业车间调度问题实例，并通过优化作业车间调度指标来最小化等待时间、增强网络连通性——这些指标与分散式部分可观测马尔可夫决策过程的奖励函数及任务完成时间具有内在关联。仿真结果表明，相较于使用中继节点或与基站保持间歇通信的方法，本方法具有更高效率，是多机器人探索领域的适用方案。我们基于机器人操作系统开发了概念验证系统，代码已开源：https://github.com/multirobotplayground/ROS-Noetic-Multi-robot-Sandbox。