Heuristics-Based Explorer for 2D Navigation

Explorer algorithms are important in the process of creating maps in unknown environments, which is an essential functionality in scenarios with changing environments such as rescue, surveillance, cleaning and transport. This project contributes to the development with the Heuristics-Based Explorer (HBE) and the experimental framework created for it. The HBE presents a novel method that integrates consolidated heuristics with a state-of-the-art computer vision heuristic. The evaluation consists of a functional model of a simulated mobile robot with sensing capabilities and a set of indoor environments to test the algorithm. This article presents a detailed description of the HBE, the system surrounding it and the experiments designed for its characterization. The results show that the proposed method outperforms existing solutions.