Efficient neighbourhood-based information gain approach for exploration of complex 3D environments

This paper presents an approach for exploring a complex 3D environment with a sensor mounted on the end effector of a robot manipulator. In contrast to many current approaches which plan as far ahead as possible using as much environment information as is available, our approach considers only a small set of poses (vector of joint angles) neighbouring the robot´s current pose in configuration space. Our approach is compared to an existing exploration strategy for a similar robot. Our results demonstrate a significant decrease in the number of information gain estimation calculations that need to be performed, while still gathering an equivalent or increased amount of information about the environment.