An architecture for multi-robot localization and mapping in the Gazebo/Robot Operating System simulation environment

Robots are an important part of urban search and rescue tasks. World wide attention has been given to developing capable physical platforms that would be beneficial for rescue teams. It is evident that use of multi-robots increases the effectiveness of these systems. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is becoming a standard platform for the robotics research community for both physical robots and simulation environments. Gazebo, with connectivity to the ROS, is a three-dimensional simulation environment that is also becoming a standard. Several simultaneous localization and mapping algorithms are implemented in the ROS; however, there is no multi-robot mapping implementation. In this work, two multi-robot mapping algorithm implementations are presented, namely multi-robot gMapping and multi-robot Hector Mapping. The multi-robot implementations are tested in the Gazebo simulation environment. Also, in order to achieve a more realistic simulation, every incremental robot movement is modeled with rotational and translational noise.