LUOJIA Explorer: A Multi-robot Autonomous Exploration and Mapping System for Unknown Spaces

Abstract. As human exploration of space advances, the exploration of unknown spaces and the construction of digital twins for these environments have become increasingly important. Autonomous exploration and mapping by unmanned systems is one of the key methods to achieve this, but existing single-robot exploration approaches are inefficient in large-scale scenarios or time-critical tasks. Multi-robot collaboration can effectively address this issue, but enabling fully autonomous multi-robot collaborative exploration of unknown spaces and constructing digital models of these spaces remain significant challenges. This paper introduces the Luojia Explorer system, a multi-robot autonomous exploration and mapping system for unknown spaces. At the algorithmic level, the system is primarily divided into two parts: multi-robot collaborative simultaneous localization and mapping (C-SLAM) and collaborative exploration and planning. Through the seamless integration of these two components, efficient multi-robot collaborative exploration of unknown spaces is achieved. Its effectiveness has been validated in campus scenarios, where it achieved an exploration efficiency of 38.15 m³/s.