Exploration of Unknown Map for Gas Searching and Picking up Objects Using Khepera Mobile Robots

In this paper, the integrated approach for searching, detecting the source of gas leakage and capturing object using Khepera III mobile robot is introduced. It was tested in natural grid environments as shown in experi- ments but it is usable in vast areas; e.g. houses, factories, and labs to pick up gas victims. Experiments are performed using a master Khepera III robot equipped with a gas sensor and two slave robots equipped with grippers to take the best path to pick up the object. Moreover, this paper proposes an improvement of Albers exploration algorithm to reduce the time required to explore an unknown map with different polygon obsta- cles. The proposed approach aims at minimizing the overall exploration time, making it possible to localize leakage gas source in an efficient way, as demonstrated in V-REP simulation as well as real world experiments. A comparison among both algorithms has shown the effectiveness of the proposed one, where the percentage of performance speedup is about 30% to 57% depending on the size of the map and number of obstacles.