Enhancing Exploration in Graph-like Worlds

Abstract

This paper explores two enhancements that can be made to single and multiple robot exploration in graph-like worlds. One enhancement considers the order in which potential places are explored and another considers the exploitation of local neighbor information to help disambiguate possible locations. Empirical evaluations show that both enhancements can produce a significant reduction in exploration effort in terms of the number of mechanical steps required over the original exploration algorithms and that for some environments up to 60% reduction in mechanical steps can be achieved.