Exploration of an unknown environment with a differential drive disc robot

Abstract

Abstract-This paper addresses the problem of exploring an unknown, planar, polygonal and simply connected environment. A saliency object (i.e. a landmark) is located in the environment. The collision-free subset of the robot's configuration space is simply connected or it might have several connected components. The robot is a differential drive system shaped as a disc. The robot has limited sensing, namely it is incapable of measuring any distance or angle, or performing self localization. The exploration problem consists in discovering the environment with the robot's sensor. To solve this problem, a motion policy is developed based on simple sensor feedback and a complete exploration strategy is represented as a Moore Machine. The proposed exploration strategy guarantees that the robot will discover the largest possible region of the environment. Consequently, the robot will find the landmark or declare that an exploration strategy to find it does not exist.

A motion strategy for exploration driven by an automaton activating feedback-based controllers

“…A preliminary version of a portion of this work appeared in [38]. The main distinguishing features of our current work compared with our previous research in [38] are: 1) We propose an automaton that filters spurious observations to activate feedback-based controllers.…”

“…2) We propose a practical hybrid control scheme, whose objective is to maintain a desired distance between the robot and the boundary of the environment. 3) The work presented in [38] did not include any experiments on a real robot at all. In this new version, experiments on a real robotic set-up were included showing the practical viability of the approach.…”

An Automaton and Super-Twisting Sliding-Mode Control for Wall Following

“…Thus, this approach allows the robot to follow the walls fast and robustly. The resulting wall following capability can be used in the task of exploring an unknown environment (Gonzalez and Latombe, 2002;Laguna et. al, 2014;Martinez et.…”

A multi‐objective approach for local path planning of autonomous mobile robot based on metaheuristics

“…This ensures that when a robot can see a specified location inside the environment, that location can also be reached by a robot. 13 This presumption affects the real performance of the robot. Hence, it is more accurate and practical to consider the MR as a nonzero-sized object.…”

“…However, the size of the robot induces additional constraints in the configuration space, in particular, the enlargement of the obstacle relative to the radius of the robot. 13 This makes the PP technique unique for a disk-shaped robot. Indeed, the configuration space is not measurable, and the robot cannot evaluate it because in the unpredictable environment the shape, size and, position of the obstacles are unavailable to the MR. To solve the PP problem according to the exploration strategy, the disc-robot must be able to gather information about the surroundings within the sensing range from the workspace.…”