Simultaneous Frontier-based Exploration and Topological Mapping

Several approaches can be found in the literature for frontier-based exploration and for offline generation of topological maps from occupancy grids. Topological maps represent the environment as a graph, where node correspond to rooms and edges correspond to doorways passages. A few papers document approaches that extract topological maps from occupancy grid of partially known environments during an exploration task. This paper presents an approach, which differs from other works for two main aspects. The topological map is generated by checking the traversability of doorways passages during exploration. The exploration strategy is based on the identification of the best frontier viewpoint, but exploits topological information for favoring the room-by-room exploration. The proposed approach has been tested with simulated experiments that show a reduced length of the total traveled distance with respect to a pure frontier-based exploration strategy.