• 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. Package 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, you can do that by typing the following command in the terminal:

sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-gmapping

4- Install ROS navigation stack. You can do that with the following command:

sudo apt-get install ros-$ROS_DISTRO-navigation

5- You should have Python 2.7. (it was not tested on Python 3).

6-You should have/install the following python modules:

-OpenCV (cv2)

sudo apt-get install python-opencv

-Numpy

sudo apt-get install python-numpy

-Sklearn

sudo apt-get install python-scikits-learn

3. Hardware Requirements

A mobile robot equipped with a laser scanner or any sensor that publishes laser scan message (sensor_msgs/LaserScan).

4. Installation

Download the package and place it inside the /src folder in your workspace. And then compile using catkin_make.

5. Setting Up Your Robots