  Communication constraints can significantly impact robots' ability to share
information, coordinate their movements, and synchronize their actions, thus
limiting coordination in Multi-Robot Exploration (MRE) applications. In this
work, we address these challenges by modeling the MRE application as a
DEC-POMDP and designing a joint policy that follows a rendezvous plan. This
policy allows robots to explore unknown environments while intermittently
sharing maps opportunistically or at rendezvous locations without being
constrained by joint path optimizations. To generate the rendezvous plan,
robots represent the MRE task as an instance of the Job Shop Scheduling Problem
(JSSP) and minimize JSSP metrics. They aim to reduce waiting times and increase
connectivity, which correlates to the DEC-POMDP rewards and time to complete
the task. Our simulation results suggest that our method is more efficient than
using relays or maintaining intermittent communication with a base station,
being a suitable approach for Multi-Robot Exploration. We developed a
proof-of-concept using the Robot Operating System (ROS) that is available at:
https://github.com/multirobotplayground/ROS-Noetic-Multi-robot-Sandbox.
