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Open Access

Modeling and Simulation of Cooperative Exploration Strategies in Unknown Environments

College of Systems Engineering, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha 410073, China
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Abstract

Cooperative spatial exploration in initially unknown surroundings is a common embodied task in various applications and requires satisfactory coordination among the agents. Unlike many other research questions, there is a lack of simulation platforms for the cooperative exploration problem to perform and statistically evaluate different methods before they are deployed in practical scenarios. To this end, this paper designs a simulation framework to run different models, which features efficient event scheduling and data sharing. On top of such a framework, we propose and implement two different cooperative exploration strategies, i.e., the synchronous and asynchronous ones. While the coordination in the former approach is conducted after gathering the perceptive information from all agents in each round, the latter enables an ad-hoc coordination. Accordingly, they exploit different principles for assigning target points for the agents. Extensive experiments on different types of environments and settings not only validate the scheduling efficiency of our simulation engine, but also demonstrate the respective advantages of the two strategies on different metrics.

Keywords

modeling and simulationevent schedulingcooperative explorationsynchronous strategyasynchronous strategy

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Complex System Modeling and Simulation
Volume 3 Issue 4,
December 2023
Pages 343-356
DOI: 10.23919/CSMS.2023.0014
Cite this article:
Peng Y, Hu Y, Ai C. Modeling and Simulation of Cooperative Exploration Strategies in Unknown Environments. Complex System Modeling and Simulation, 2023, 3(4): 343-356. https://doi.org/10.23919/CSMS.2023.0014

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Received: 28 April 2023
Revised: 21 May 2023
Accepted: 15 June 2023
Published: 07 December 2023
© The author(s) 2023.

The articles published in this open access journal are distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
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