CURE

CURE is a multi-robot autonomous exploration planner that first proposed using unknown regions to guide exploration. This is a minimalist version of CURE that you can quickly deploy and run. The "region-guided" multi-robot autonomous exploration planner CURE (Centroids of Unknown Regions Exploration) breaks through the local field of view limitation of the frontier method and greatly improves exploration efficiency.

<p align="center"> <img src="img/kt.png" width = "550" height = "270" /> </p> <p align="center"> <img src="img/1743478986393.gif" width = "300" height = "178" /> <img src="img/1743478992227.gif" width = "300" height = "178" /> </p>

Video Link: Bilibili Video 1; Bilibili Video 2; Bilibili Video 3: 10 robots; Youtube

Paper: IEEE

Q. Bi, X. Zhang*, et al., "CURE: A Hierarchical Framework for Multi-Robot Autonomous Exploration Inspired by Centroids of Unknown Regions," in IEEE Transactions on Automation Science and Engineering, vol. 21, no. 3, pp. 3773-3786, July 2024, doi: 10.1109/TASE.2023.3285300.

If it is useful to you, please cite our paper and ⭐️ our code. Thanks!

News:

• Apr 9, 2025: The code for CURE is released.
• Jun 6, 2023: The paper is accepted by T-ASE.
• Nov 11, 2022: The paper is submitted to T-ASE.

Other Links: uneven terrain exploration code LRAE

Quick Start

These instructions assume that ROS Noetic desktop-full is installed.

Ensure that Opencv 4 has been installed. When installing ROS Noetic desktop-full, it is usually installed by default.

The OpenCV version we are using is 4.2.0. View OpenCV version:

opencv_version

1. Prerequisites

sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-gmapping ros-noetic-navigation ros-noetic-teb-local-planner

sudo apt-get install ros-noetic-gazebo-ros-control ros-noetic-diff-drive-controller ros-noetic-joint-state-controller ros-noetic-robot-state-publisher

2. Build CURE

Then simply clone and compile our package:

cd ${YOUR_WORKSPACE_PATH}/src
git clone git@github.com:NKU-MobFly-Robotics/CURE1.git
cd ../ 
catkin_make

3. Run CURE in simulation

After the compilation is successful, you need to open two terminals and run the following two commands.

source devel/setup.bash && roslaunch cure_planner three_p3dx.launch

source devel/setup.bash && roslaunch cure_planner exploration.launch

Run CURE in other scenes

Modify lines 7-8 of three_p3dx.launch.

Acknowledgements

We sincerely appreciate the following open source projects: rrt_exploration, p3dx.