Autoexplorer: Autonomous Exploration of Unknown Environments using Fast Frontier-Region Detection and Parallel Path Planning

Kyung Min Han, Young J. Kim

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

4 Scopus citations

Abstract

We propose a fully autonomous system for mobile robot exploration in unknown environments. Our system employs a novel frontier detection algorithm based on the fast front propagation (FFP) technique and uses parallel path planning to reach the detected front regions. Given an occupancy grid map in 2D, possibly updated online, our algorithm can find all the frontier points that can allow mobile robots to visit unexplored regions to maximize the exploratory coverage. Our FFP method is six~seven times faster than the state-of-the-art wavefront frontier detection algorithm in terms of finding frontier points without compromising the detection accuracy. The speedup can be further accelerated by simplifying the map without degrading the detection accuracy. To expedite locating the optimal frontier point, We also eliminate spurious points by the obstacle filter and the novel boundary filter. In addition, we parallelize the global planning phase using the branch-and-bound A*, where the search space of each thread is confined by its best knowledge discovered during the parallel search. As a result, our parallel path-planning algorithm operating on 20 threads is about 30 times faster than the vanilla exploration system that operates on a single thread. Our method is validated through extensive experiments, including autonomous robot exploration in both synthetic and real-world scenarios. In the real-world experiment, we show that an autonomous navigation system using a human-sized mobile manipulator robot equipped with a low-end embedded processor that fully integrates our FFP and parallel path-planning algorithms.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationIEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022
PublisherInstitute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc.
Pages10536-10541
Number of pages6
ISBN (Electronic)9781665479271
DOIs
StatePublished - 2022
Event2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022 - Kyoto, Japan
Duration: 23 Oct 202227 Oct 2022

Publication series

NameIEEE International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems
Volume2022-October
ISSN (Print)2153-0858
ISSN (Electronic)2153-0866

Conference

Conference2022 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, IROS 2022
Country/TerritoryJapan
CityKyoto
Period23/10/2227/10/22

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 IEEE.

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