SFRE: Safe and Fast Robotic Exploration for 3D Uneven Terrains

Exploration strategies of ground robots are often applied in indoor structured environments. However, numerous challenges persist in outdoor 3D unstructured environments, particularly in rough and rugged terrains. This paper proposed an autonomous exploration framework (SFRE) for ground mobile robot...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Liu, Shengkai, Wang, Runhua, Bi, Qingchen, Wen, Guanghui, Zhang, Xuebo
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Subjects:
Mechatronics
Mobile robots
Partitioning algorithms
Safety
Space exploration
Three-dimensional displays
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Summary:Exploration strategies of ground robots are often applied in indoor structured environments. However, numerous challenges persist in outdoor 3D unstructured environments, particularly in rough and rugged terrains. This paper proposed an autonomous exploration framework (SFRE) for ground mobile robots in uneven environments. The realization of SFRE can be broken down into three stages. First, the 2D traversability grid map is obtained by analyzing the terrain features of 3D uneven environments. Second, to improve exploration efficiency, we partition the exploration space and utilize the sparrow search algorithm to determine the visit order of each subspace. Finally, to ensure that the robot explores unknown regions safely, a new frontiers selection criterion that combines the height and slope of the frontiers is proposed, which has not been considered in previous methods for frontiers selection. Experiments are conducted to validate the safety and high efficiency of the proposed autonomous exploration framework. All tests show a reduction of 27% in exploration time and 32% in traveling distance compared to the comparative method. (Supplemented video link: https://youtu.be/-eVXv8Zx6VA)
ISSN:2159-6255
DOI:10.1109/AIM55361.2024.10637037