Exploration and Control

In case of unknown environments, a rescue robot is supposed to explore all locations which have not been explored yet. The borders of known and unknown areas are known as frontiers. In our exploration method, frontiers are selected as targets to move to.

The robot motion is planned based on obstacle avoidance and the safe gap navigation (SGP) method.

The right image shows a piece of a map, in which gray color shows unknown area, black color is for obstacles and blue is for frontiers.

The navigation system uses a grid map generated by a SLAM module based on the KARTO library.

To visualize the status of each module and also control the behavior of the robot, we have designed a reconfigurable operational interface which can be reconfigured quickly if a new device is attached to the robot system.