skip to main content
10.1145/3598151.3598191acmotherconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesrobceConference Proceedingsconference-collections
research-article

A Hierarchical Autonomous Exploration Algorithm for Large-scale and Complex Environments with Mobile Robot

Published: 18 July 2023 Publication History

Abstract

In order to solve the problem of low exploration efficiency caused by repeatedly backtracking the frontiers in large and complex environments, a hierarchical autonomous exploration algorithm is proposed. Firstly, based on the robot's static model to judge the environment's traversability, which allows robots to explore complex 3D environments. Following that, a hybrid strategy is used to filter out frontiers within a local planning horizon, thus complete exploration of the local area is achieved by solving the traveling salesman problem (TSP). Finally, the sparse global topology map generates transfer paths between sub-areas, transferring the robot to another sub-area to resume exploration. Compared to the RRT autonomous exploration algorithm and the GBP autonomous exploration algorithm, the method in this work reduces the exploration path by more than 13.8% and the exploration time by more than 23.7%. The results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improves the autonomous exploration efficiency of mobile robots in large and complex environments.

References

[1]
Papachristos, Christos and Khattak, Shehryar and Mascarich, Frank and Alexis, Kostas. 2019. Autonomous navigation and mapping in underground mines using aerial robots. 2019 IEEE Aerospace Conference. IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 1-8. https://doi.org/10.1109/AERO.2019.8741532.
[2]
Liu Zhiyong, Yan Jun, Yao Daizhen. 2022. Optimization of electromechanical dynamic model of liner motor vehicle system. 2022. J. CNKI, 41,1 (March 2022), 49-56. https://doi.org/10.13785/j.cnki.nmggydxxbzrkxb.2022.01.007.
[3]
Balta, Haris and Bedkowski, Janusz and Govindaraj, Shashank and Majek, Karol and Musialik, Pawel and Serrano, Daniel and Alexis, Kostas and Siegwart, Roland and De Cubber, Geert. 2017. Integrated data management for a fleet of search‐and‐rescue robots. J. Wiley Online Library. 34, 3, 539-582. https://doi.org/10.1002/rob.21651.
[4]
Gao, Yang and Chien, Steve. 2017. Review on space robotics: Toward top-level science through space exploration. J. Sci. Robot, 2, 7 (Jun 2017), eaan5074. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scirobotics.aan5074.
[5]
Khattak, Shehryar and Nguyen, Huan and Mascarich, Frank and Dang, Tung and Alexis, Kostas. 2020. Complementary multi–modal sensor fusion for resilient robot pose estimation in subterranean environments. International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS). IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 1024-1029. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICUAS48674.2020.9213865.
[6]
Holz, Dirk and Basilico, Nicola and Amigoni, Francesco and Behnke, Sven. 2010. Evaluating the efficiency of frontier-based exploration strategies. 41st International Symposium on Robotics and ROBOTIK 2010 (6th German Conference on Robotics). VDE, 1-8.
[7]
Zhang, Xuetao and Chu, Yubin and Liu, Yisha and Zhang, Xuebo and Zhuang, Yan. 2021. A novel informative autonomous exploration strategy with uniform sampling for quadrotors. J. IEEE, 69, 12 (December 2021), 13131-13140. https://doi.org/10.1109/TIE.2021.3137616.
[8]
Kulkarni, Mihir and Dharmadhikari, Mihir and Tranzatto, Marco and Zimmermann, Samuel and Reijgwart, Victor and De Petris, Paolo and Nguyen, Huan and Khedekar, Nikhil and Papachristos, Christos and Ott, Lionel and others. 2022. Autonomous teamed exploration of subterranean environments using legged and aerial robots. International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 3306-3313. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA46639.2022.9812401.
[9]
Naazare, Menaka and Rosas, Francisco Garcia and Schulz, Dirk. 2022. Online Next-Best-View Planner for 3D-Exploration and Inspection With a Mobile Manipulator Robot. J. IEEE, 7,2 (January 2022), 3779-3786. https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2022.3146558.
[10]
Senarathne, PGCN and Wang, Danwei. 2015. Incremental algorithms for Safe and Reachable Frontier Detection for robot exploration. J. ELSEVIER, 72 (October 2015), 189-206. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.robot.2015.05.009.
[11]
Yamauchi, Brian. 1997. A frontier-based approach for autonomous exploration. Proceedings 1997 IEEE International Symposium on Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation CIRA'97.'Towards New Computational Principles for Robotics and Automation'. IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 1997, 146-151. https://doi.org/10.1109/CIRA.1997.613851.
[12]
Freda, Luigi and Oriolo, Giuseppe. 2005. Frontier-based probabilistic strategies for sensor-based exploration. Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation. IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 3881-3887. https://doi.org/10.1109/ROBOT.2005.1570713
[13]
Wettach, Jens and Berns, Karsten. 2010. Dynamic frontier based exploration with a mobile indoor robot. ISR 2010 (41st International Symposium on Robotics) and ROBOTIK 2010 (6th German Conference on Robotics). VDE, 2010, 1-8.
[14]
Mobarhani, Amir and Nazari, Shaghayegh and Tamjidi, Amir H and Taghirad, Hamid D. 2011. Histogram based frontier exploration. 2011 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems. IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 1128-1133. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2011.6095018.
[15]
Meng, Zehui and Qin, Hailong and Chen, Ziyue and Chen, Xudong and Sun, Hao and Lin, Feng and Ang, Marcelo H. 2017. A two-stage optimized next-view planning framework for 3-d unknown environment exploration, and structural reconstruction. J. IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2, 3 (January, 2017), 1680-1687. https://doi.org/10.1109/LRA.2017.2655144.
[16]
Umari, Hassan and Mukhopadhyay, Shayok. 2017. Autonomous robotic exploration based on multiple rapidly-exploring randomized trees. 2017 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 1396-1402. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS.2017.8202319.
[17]
Dang, Tung and Mascarich, Frank and Khattak, Shehryar and Papachristos, Christos and Alexis, Kostas. 2019. Graph-based path planning for autonomous robotic exploration in subterranean environments. IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 3105-3112. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS40897.2019.8968151.
[18]
Dharmadhikari, Mihir and Dang, Tung and Solanka, Lukas and Loje, Johannes and Nguyen, Huan and Khedekar, Nikhil and Alexis, Kostas. 2020. Motion primitives-based path planning for fast and agile exploration using aerial robots. 2020 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 179-185. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICRA40945.2020.9196964.
[19]
Bellone, Mauro and Reina, Giulio and Giannoccaro, Nicola I and Spedicato, Luigi.2013. Unevenness point descriptor for terrain analysis in mobile robot applications. J. SAGE Publications Sage 10,7 (February 2013), 284. https://doi.org/10.5772/56240.
[20]
Hornung, Armin and Wurm, Kai M and Bennewitz, Maren and Stachniss, Cyrill and Burgard, Wolfram. 2013. OctoMap: An efficient probabilistic 3D mapping framework based on octrees. J. Springer 34, 189-206. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10514-012-9321-0.
[21]
Yang, Fan and Cao, Chao and Zhu, Hongbiao and Oh, Jean and Zhang, Ji. 2022. FAR planner: Fast, attemptable route planner using dynamic visibility update. 2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS). IEEE, Piscataway, USA, 9-16. https://doi.org/10.1109/IROS47612.2022.9981574.

Index Terms

  1. A Hierarchical Autonomous Exploration Algorithm for Large-scale and Complex Environments with Mobile Robot
          Index terms have been assigned to the content through auto-classification.

          Recommendations

          Comments

          Information & Contributors

          Information

          Published In

          cover image ACM Other conferences
          RobCE '23: Proceedings of the 2023 3rd International Conference on Robotics and Control Engineering
          May 2023
          255 pages
          ISBN:9781450398107
          DOI:10.1145/3598151
          Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

          Publisher

          Association for Computing Machinery

          New York, NY, United States

          Publication History

          Published: 18 July 2023

          Permissions

          Request permissions for this article.

          Check for updates

          Author Tags

          1. Autonomous exploration
          2. Complex environment
          3. Mobile robots
          4. Path planning

          Qualifiers

          • Research-article
          • Research
          • Refereed limited

          Funding Sources

          • Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Science and technology major special pilot project

          Conference

          RobCE 2023

          Contributors

          Other Metrics

          Bibliometrics & Citations

          Bibliometrics

          Article Metrics

          • 0
            Total Citations
          • 52
            Total Downloads
          • Downloads (Last 12 months)26
          • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)2
          Reflects downloads up to 17 Jan 2025

          Other Metrics

          Citations

          View Options

          Login options

          View options

          PDF

          View or Download as a PDF file.

          PDF

          eReader

          View online with eReader.

          eReader

          HTML Format

          View this article in HTML Format.

          HTML Format

          Media

          Figures

          Other

          Tables

          Share

          Share

          Share this Publication link

          Share on social media