Cooperative Indoor Space Exploration by Multiple Micro Aerial Vehicles with Connectivity Constraints

In recent years, the development of navigation technology improves the reliability in flight of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs), and cooperative operation using multiple MAVs attracts a great deal of attention. The purpose of this research is to construct a system that efficiently explores unknown indoor environments using multiple MAVs when a disaster occurs. In order to achieve the purpose, this paper proposes a cooperative exploration method using a new heuristic function. The heuristic function is evaluated with connectivity constraints between all MAVs and the base station. Therefore, the proposed method is effective when the method is applied to actual MAVs. We implement the proposed method and executed two types of simulations in three different environments. The results show that the proposed method can realize more efficient exploration than the existing method in many cases while the connectivity constraints are satisfied. Finally, in order to explore unknown environments more efficiently, future works are indicated.