Concave-Hull Induced Graph-Gain for Fast and Robust Robotic Exploration

Existing RRT-based exploration methods often suffer from interruptions in the exploration process due to the inability to detect all frontiers of the drivable area in the mapping map. These methods cannot detect all frontiers because the RRT expansion is disturbed by factors such as RRT preset parameters, sliding window constraints, complex external environment, etc, and thus cannot completely cover the drivable area within a limited time. We address this problem by redefining exploration frontiers, designing a novel exploration gain, and constructing minimum RRT search spaces. Our method is evaluated against the existing state-of-the-art RRT-based methods in simulated benchmarks and outdoor environments. The results show that our method is more robust to the above factors while reducing computational cost. Our method is made open source to benefit the community.

Automated summary

Existing RRT-based exploration methods often face interruptions in the exploration process due to the inability to detect all frontiers of the drivable area in the mapping map. We propose a solution by redefining exploration frontiers, designing a novel exploration gain, and constructing minimum RRT search spaces. Our method outperforms existing methods in simulated benchmarks and outdoor environments, demonstrating better robustness and reduced computational cost. We have made our method open source for the benefit of the community.