• Package Available on Github: https://github.com/hasauino/rrt_exploration

1. Introduction

"rrt_exploration" is a ROS package that implements a multi-robot map exploration algorithm for mobile robots. It is based on the Rapidly-Exploring Random Tree (RRT) algorithm. It uses occupancy girds as a map representation.The package has 5 different ROS nodes:

• Global RRT frontier point detector node.
• Local RRT frontier point detector node.
• OpenCV-based frontier detector node.
• Filter node.
• Assigner node.

The video below shows the package running on Gazebo simulation of three robots:

This video below shows the package running on real robots:

The package works for a single robot as well.

2. Requirements

The package has been tested on both ROS Kinetic and ROS Indigo, it should work on other distributions like Jade. The following requirements are needed before installing the package:

1- You should have installed a ROS distribution (indigo or later. Recommended is either indigo or kinetic).

2- Created a workspace.

3- Installed the "gmapping" ROS package: on Ubuntu, and if you are running ROS Kinectic, you can do that by typing the following command in the terminal:

source /opt/ros/$ROS_DISTRO/setup.bash