Autonomous Exploration Development Environment
- The repository is meant for leveraging system development and robot deployment for ground-based autonomous navigation and exploration. Containing a variety of simulation environments, autonomous navigation modules such as collision avoidance, terrain traversability analysis, path following, etc, and a set of visualization tools, users can develop autonomous navigation systems and later on port those systems onto real robots for deployment.
- A dynamic RRT based dual stage planner is developed in this repository to explore unknown environments efficiently and completely. The planner involves two stages - an exploration stage for extending the boundary of the map, and a relocation stage for explicitly transiting the robot to different sub-areas in the environment. The exploration stage develops Rapidly-exploring Random Tree (RRT) and dynamically expand the RRT over replanning steps. The relocation stage maintains a graph through the mapped environment. During the course of exploration, the method transitions back-and-forth between the two stages to explore all areas in the environment.