@inproceedings{wurm-etal:iros-2010,
   author = "Kai M. Wurm and Christian Dornhege and Patrick Eyerich and Cyrill Stachniss and Bernhard Nebel and Wolfram Burgard",
   title = "Coordinated Exploration with Marsupial Teams of Robots using Temporal Symbolic Planning",
   booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2010)",
   month = "october",
   year = "2010",
   abstract = "The problem of autonomously exploring an environment
                  with a team of robots received considerable
                  attention in the past. However, there are relatively
                  few approaches to coordinate teams of robots that
                  are able to deploy and retrieve other
                  robots. Efficiently coordinating the exploration
                  with such marsupial robots requires advanced
                  planning mechanisms that are able to consider
                  symbolic deployment and retrieval actions.  In this
                  paper, we propose a novel approach for coordinating
                  the exploration with marsupial robot teams. Our
                  method integrates a temporal symbolic planner that
                  explicitly considers deployment and retrieval
                  actions with a traditional cost-based assignment
                  procedure. Our approach has been implemented and
                  evaluated in several simulated environments and with
                  varying team sizes. The results demonstrate that our
                  proposed method is able to coordinate marsupial
                  teams of robots to efficiently explore unknown
                  environments."
}