A Comparative Evaluation of Exploration Strategies and Heuristics to Improve Them

Abstract

Exploration strategies play an important role in influencing the performance of an autonomous mobile robot exploring and mapping an unknown environment. Although several exploration strategies have been proposed in the last years, their experimental evaluation and comparison are still largely unaddressed. In this paper, we quantitatively evaluate exploration strategies by experimentally comparing, in a simulation setting, a representative sample of techniques taken from literature. From a broader perspective, our work also contributes to the development of good experimental methodologies in the field of autonomous mobile robotics by promoting the principles of comparison, reproducibility, and repeatability of experiments.