Sensor-based Exploration for General Robotic Systems

We present a method for sensor-based exploration of unknown environments by a robotic system equipped with rangefinders. The method is based on the incremental generation of a configuration-space data structure called sensor-based exploration tree (SET). The expansion of the SET is driven by information at the world level, where the perception process takes place. In particular, the frontiers of the explored region are used to guide the search for informative view configurations. Various exploration strategies may be obtained by instantiating the general SET method with different sampling techniques. Two of these are compared by simulations in 2D and 3D worlds.