This thesis investigates the problem of collaborative exploration and transmissionof information among a team of heterogeneous agents, to facilitate fellow agent's nav-igation in unknown environments with limited bandwidth resources. In such systems,the navigation cost of an agent is influenced by the amount of possessed informationit receives from other supporting agents. Under such circumstances, the supportingagents has to efficiently explore the unknown environment and transmit informa-tion to navigating agents. To address it, we design a joint communication and pathplanning framework for team of heterogeneous agents, and analyze and improve thetradeoff between the cost-of-navigation and the amount of data-transmission.The proposed framework includes two agent types: Seeker, which moves towardsdesignated goals, and Supporter, which assists by mapping remote locations. Tominimize the traversal cost of navigating agents, the supporting agents perform on-line path planning for exploring relevant portion of the environment, and efficientlytransmit gathered information based on the Value-of-Information (VoI) in restrictedbandwidth environment. This study evaluates the cost of navigation and data com-munication by analyzing the team's performance based on what type of informationis transmitted, when transmission is triggered, and, for multiple seeker and supporteragents, how much information being send to each and by whom. Simulation resultsshows that our proposed methodology reduces the amount of data being transmittedsignificantly (more than 95% reduction) with a minimal (less than 12%) increase inthe navigation cost on average across multiple examples.
