Multirobot autonomous exploration often suffers from low efficiency and high communication overhead. To address this, we propose an Unknown-Region-Guided, collaboration- and communication-efficient autonomous Exploration framework (URGE), which introduces a sub-region-based environmental representation and information sharing scheme to enable task allocation that jointly optimizes cost and load, ultimately achieving spatially dispersed exploration. The proposed framework is evaluated using five metrics through extensive comparisons with state-of-the-art (SOTA) methods, ablation studies, and real-world experiments. Compared with the SOTA methods, URGE improves exploration efficiency by 13.3%–45.6% and reduces redundant exploration by 22.5%–51.5%.

If you find URGE useful in your research, please consider citing:

@ARTICLE{11613101,
  author={Qingchen Bi, Xuebo Zhang, Shiyong Zhang, Qianli Dong, Jing Yuan},
  journal={IEEE Transactions on Robotics}, 
  title={{URGE}: Efficient Decentralized Multirobot Exploration Guided by Unknown Regions Under Limited Communication}, 
  year={2026},
  volume={42},
  pages={3028-3047}
}