Intermittent Rendezvous Plans with Mixed Integer Linear Program for Large-Scale Multi-Robot Exploration

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Autori principali: da Silva, Alysson Ribeiro, Chaimowicz, Luiz
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author da Silva, Alysson Ribeiro
Chaimowicz, Luiz
author_facet da Silva, Alysson Ribeiro
Chaimowicz, Luiz
contents Multi-Robot Exploration (MRE) systems with communication constraints have proven efficient in accomplishing a variety of tasks, including search-and-rescue, stealth, and military operations. While some works focus on opportunistic approaches for efficiency, others concentrate on pre-planned trajectories or scheduling for increased interpretability. However, scheduling usually requires knowledge of the environment beforehand, which prevents its deployment in several domains due to related uncertainties (e.g., underwater exploration). In our previous work, we proposed an intermittent communications framework for MRE under communication constraints that uses scheduled rendezvous events to mitigate such limitations. However, the system was unable to generate optimal plans and had no mechanisms to follow the plan considering realistic trajectories, which is not suited for real-world deployments. In this work, we further investigate the problem by formulating the Multi-Robot Exploration with Communication Constraints and Intermittent Connectivity (MRE-CCIC) problem. We propose a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) formulation to generate rendezvous plans and a policy to follow them based on the Rendezvous Tracking for Unknown Scenarios (RTUS) mechanism. The RTUS is a simple rule to allow robots to follow the assigned plan, considering unknown conditions. Finally, we evaluated our method in a large-scale environment configured in Gazebo simulations. The results suggest that our method can follow the plan promptly and accomplish the task efficiently. We provide an open-source implementation of both the MILP plan generator and the large-scale MRE-CCIC.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_12237
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Intermittent Rendezvous Plans with Mixed Integer Linear Program for Large-Scale Multi-Robot Exploration
da Silva, Alysson Ribeiro
Chaimowicz, Luiz
Robotics
Human-Computer Interaction
Multiagent Systems
Multi-Robot Exploration (MRE) systems with communication constraints have proven efficient in accomplishing a variety of tasks, including search-and-rescue, stealth, and military operations. While some works focus on opportunistic approaches for efficiency, others concentrate on pre-planned trajectories or scheduling for increased interpretability. However, scheduling usually requires knowledge of the environment beforehand, which prevents its deployment in several domains due to related uncertainties (e.g., underwater exploration). In our previous work, we proposed an intermittent communications framework for MRE under communication constraints that uses scheduled rendezvous events to mitigate such limitations. However, the system was unable to generate optimal plans and had no mechanisms to follow the plan considering realistic trajectories, which is not suited for real-world deployments. In this work, we further investigate the problem by formulating the Multi-Robot Exploration with Communication Constraints and Intermittent Connectivity (MRE-CCIC) problem. We propose a Mixed-Integer Linear Program (MILP) formulation to generate rendezvous plans and a policy to follow them based on the Rendezvous Tracking for Unknown Scenarios (RTUS) mechanism. The RTUS is a simple rule to allow robots to follow the assigned plan, considering unknown conditions. Finally, we evaluated our method in a large-scale environment configured in Gazebo simulations. The results suggest that our method can follow the plan promptly and accomplish the task efficiently. We provide an open-source implementation of both the MILP plan generator and the large-scale MRE-CCIC.
title Intermittent Rendezvous Plans with Mixed Integer Linear Program for Large-Scale Multi-Robot Exploration
topic Robotics
Human-Computer Interaction
Multiagent Systems
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.12237