Multi-robot Grid Graph Exploration Planner

The exploration planner builds on top of exsisting planners to enable merging global planning graphs among multiple robots and increases the planning speed by employing grid based local exploration planning.

Local exploration planning graph

Global graph built during exploration planning

Installation

These instructions assume that ROS desktop-full of the appropriate ROS distro is installed.

Install necessary libraries:

For Ubuntu 20.04 and ROS Noetic:

sudo apt install python3-catkin-tools \
libgoogle-glog-dev \
ros-noetic-joy \
ros-noetic-twist-mux \
ros-noetic-interactive-marker-twist-server \
ros-noetic-octomap-ros

Create the workspace:

mkdir -p mggplanner_ws/src/exploration
cd mggplanner_ws/src/exploration

Clone the planner

git clone https://github.com/MISTLab/MGGPlanner.git

Clone and update the required packages:

cd <path/to/mggplanner_ws>
wstool init
wstool merge ./src/exploration/MGGPlanner/packages_https.rosinstall
wstool update

Note: ./src/exploration/MGGPlanner/packages_https.rosinstall is for https urls.

Build:

catkin config -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
catkin build

Running MGG Planner Simulations

Single Robot Simualation

Launching simulation in the pittsburgh mine environment

roslaunch mggplanner mgg_sim_flat.launch

Launching simulation in the darpa cave

roslaunch mggplanner mgg_sim_darpa_cave.launch

Multi-robot Simulations

To launch three robot simulations:

roslaunch mggplanner 3smb_sim_mgg.launch

In Ubuntu 18.04 with ROS Melodic, the gazebo node might crash when running the ground robot simulation. In this case set the gpu parameter to false here.

Results

Software Architecture Used During the Deployments

Deployment Arena

Three robots were deployed in a Mars-analog environment, using the MGG planner to coordinate with one another and distribute across the environment without any predefined exploration preferences.

References

Explanation Video

If you use this work in your research, please cite the following publications:

MGG planner tests in a Mars analogs environment

@article{vvaradharajan2025,
  title={A Multi-Robot Exploration Planner for Space
Applications},
  author={Varadharajan and Vivek Shankar, Beltrame and Giovanni},
  journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation letters},
  volume = {},
  number = {},
  pages = {},  
  year={2025}
}

You can contact us for any question:

• Vivek Shankar Varadharajan
• Giovanni Beltrame

We acknowledge the contributions of the authors of gbplanner2, and our planner (MGGplanner) has been built on top of gbplanner2's codebase.