Multi-Robot 3D Gas Distribution Mapping: Coordination, Information Sharing and Environmental Knowledge

Environmental monitoring and mapping operations are an essential tool to combat climate change. An important branch of this domain concerns the construction of reliable gas maps. Adaptive navigation strategies coupled with multi-robot systems improve the outcome of an environmental mapping mission by focusing more efficiently on informative areas. This direction is yet to be explored in the context of gas mapping, which presents peculiar challenges due to the hard-to-sense and expensive-to-model nature of the underlying phenomenon. In this paper, we introduce the application of a multi-robot system to a gas mission with severe time constraints. We study the impact of information-based navigation strategies, coupled with increasing levels of coordination among the robots, on information gathering and consequent map reconstruction performance. We also focus on proposing solutions that inject additional knowledge into the system to enhance the final mapping outcome. We tested the strategies through extensive high-fidelity simulation experiments, and we compared the proposed approaches to three relevant baseline methods.