Exploration of Unknown Environments by an Autonomous Mobile Robot

This is a survey of 23 state-of-the-art works in the area of mobile robot exploration of unknown environments according to the Columbia University Candidacy Exam requirements. The purpose of this exam is to establish that...

the PhD student has demonstrated a depth of scholarship in the literature and the methods of the student's chosen area of research, and has demonstrated a facility with the scholarly skills of critical evaluation and verbal expression.

This survey focuses on the use of a mobile robot for autonomous exploration of an initially unknown environment. Here, "exploration" is defined as a task whose final or intermediate result is a model of the environment.

The scope of the survey includes the following aspects:

• mobile robot sensors for environmental modeling
• types of explored environments
• approaches to model updates
• handling uncertainties

Since there has been a lot of work in the area of environmental modeling by mobile robots, due to the requirements of the candidacy exam for scope and effort, I had to make the following restrictions and exclusions:

• I only discuss the perception and modeling aspects of the robot architecture. Planning, obstacle avoidance and motion control are outside of the scope of this survey.
• I include localization only when it is done simultaneously with and inseparably from modeling
• I do not discuss exploration strategies or view point planning
• I do not discuss multi-robot systems.