Improved Exploration Algorithm Using Reliability Index of Thinning Based Topological Nodes

For navigation of a service robot, mapping and localization are very important. To estimate the robot pose, the map of the environment is required and it can be built by exploration or SLAM. Exploration is the fundamental task of guiding a robot autonomously during mapping such that it covers the entire environment with its sensors. In this paper, an efficient exploration scheme based on the position probability of the end nodes of a topological map is proposed. In this scheme, a topological map is constructed in real time using the thinning-based approach. The robot then updates the position probability of each end node maintaining its position at the current location based on the Bayesian update rule using the range data. From this probability, the robot can determine whether or not it needs to visit the specific end node to examine the environment around this node. Various experiments show that the proposed exploration scheme can perform exploration more efficiently than other schemes in that, in most cases, exploration for the entire environment can be completed without directly visiting everywhere in the environment.