Moving From ‘How to go There?’ to ‘Where to go?’: Towards Increased Autonomy of Mobile Robots

Abstract

Autonomous mobile robots have seen a wide spread development in recent years, due to their possible applications (e.g., surveillance and search and rescue). Several techniques have been proposed for solving the path planning problem, in which a user specifies spatial targets and the robots autonomously decide how to go there. In contrast, the problem of where to go next, in which the targets themselves are autonomously decided by the robots, is largely unexplored and lacking an assessed theoretical basis. In this work, we make a step towards a framework for casting and addressing this problem. The framework includes the following dimensions: the amount of knowledge about the environment the robots have, the kind of that knowledge, the criteria used to evaluate the success of the decisions, the number of decision makers, and the possible adversarial nature of the settings. We focus on applications relative to exploration and patrolling.

Exploration and Mapping with Groups of Robots: Recent Trends

“…Figure 2 shows the abstract model of the robotic system behavior. Such a general model presents several dimensions that can be controlled (to some degree) by the robot designer [7]. Here, an extension is provided to account for the new developments in the field:…”

Study, design, and evaluation of exploration strategies for autonomous mobile robots

“…Clearly, the decisions made could have a significant impact on the performance of the exploration and, if made effectively, could really boost the robots' autonomy. However, despite the importance of the development of techniques to make mobile robots more autonomous, general techniques are not mature yet (Amigoni, Basilico, and Quattrini Li, 2014).…”