Dynamic algorithm for safe and reachable frontier point generation for robot exploration

摘要

In frontier-based exploration, the primary work is to iteratively detect frontiers and generate frontier points to guide the mobile robot to explore the unknown environment. However, most frontier detection algorithms detect the frontiers by processing the entire map data. This is a time-consuming process. In this work, we present a novel approach to dynamically generate safe and reachable frontier points. The proposed approach examines only the new coming laser data to extract coarse frontier points and then refines them to the global optimal frontier points by combining them with global topological map. Only the current laser data and topological information are processed, the computational cost of the proposed method has a significant reduction comparing to traditional approaches. Thus, this method provides an opportunity to improve the efficiency of autonomous exploration. Experimental results verified the effectiveness and real time performance of the proposed approach.