Internal and external frontier-based algorithm for autonomous mobile robot exploration in unknown environment

Abstract

Navigation in the absence of initial environmental information is a situation in which a robot is faced with the difficulty of traversing an unknown area for exploration with obtaining the environmental information simultaneously. Therefore, to complete and optimize the exploration efficiently, the robot needs an autonomous path-planning algorithm. This work proposes a new autonomous path-planning algorithm for exploration in an unknown environment based on paired frontiers, which we call internal and external frontiers algorithm (IEFA), that defines extended area for navigation of the mobile robot. For each exploration round, the robot defines external frontiers using the maximum range of sensors. Then, the robot generates internal frontiers, that is, pairs of external frontiers by varying the range of sensors. According to the size of each pair of frontiers, the algorithm generates the target point for robot navigation. The frontiers of internal layer are utilized as a main parameter for generation of next exploration point. We evaluated the proposed algorithm in simulation environments using the ROS toolbox of MATLAB and compared it with two previous exploration algorithms. From the experimental results, the proposed algorithm showed from 31% to 85% better performance in the path distance than previous algorithms.