An improved Frontier-Based Approach for Autonomous Exploration

Abstract

A new approach for autonomous exploration in an unknown scenario based on the concept of frontiers is proposed in this paper. Exploration frontiers introduced by [4], are the regions on the boundary between open space and unexplored space. A mobile robot is able to construct its map by adding new space and moving to unvisited frontiers until the entire environment has been explored. However, the original frontier strategy, suffering from local minima, only considers distance and size of unknown spaces, resulting in low exploration efficiency in complex environments. By making use of the robot heading information using wheel odometry and coarse graph representation of the environment, the modified exploration method is able to balance the mapping coverage and time expenditure to a greater extent. The proposed method is experimentally verified on a mobile platform, exploring a real-world office environment cluttered with a variety of obstacles.