Autonomous Exploration Using Ground Robots with Safety Guarantees

Abstract

Autonomous exploration in an unknown environment is widely studied, and many exploration strategies exist. However, in most of the works, safety is not usually given top priority. The reason behind the violation of safety by most of the exploration algorithms in real-world applications is the ignorance of some or all of the following factors (i) the mathematical model of the robot, (ii) practical constraints on states (like constrained steering angle, speed, etc.) and inputs (like actuator saturation), and (iii) hardware constraints such as sampling time, sensor noise, modelling uncertainties, etc. In this work, we propose an autonomous exploration framework for the 2-D exploration problem that considers the factors above to provide safety guarantees for the robot and the environment. The effectiveness of this method is shown in a high-fidelity simulation of different robots with onboard sensors in different simulation environments and real-world implementation.