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
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-rosCreate the workspace:
mkdir -p mggplanner_ws/src/exploration
cd mggplanner_ws/src/explorationClone the planner
git clone https://github.com/MISTLab/MGGPlanner.gitClone and update the required packages:
cd <path/to/mggplanner_ws>
wstool init
wstool merge ./src/exploration/MGGPlanner/packages_https.rosinstall
wstool updateNote: ./src/exploration/MGGPlanner/packages_https.rosinstall is for https urls.
Build:
catkin config -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release
catkin buildLaunching simulation in the pittsburgh mine environment
roslaunch mggplanner mgg_sim_flat.launchLaunching simulation in the darpa cave
roslaunch mggplanner mgg_sim_darpa_cave.launchTo launch three robot simulations:
roslaunch mggplanner 3smb_sim_mgg.launchIn 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.
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.
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:
We acknowledge the contributions of the authors of gbplanner2, and our planner (MGGplanner) has been built on top of gbplanner2's codebase.