Experimental evaluation of some exploration strategies for mobile robots

The ability of building maps of environments where they operate is one of the main requirements for autonomous mobile robots. An efficient map building process is based on a good exploration strategy that determines the most convenient observation positions in a partially known environment in order to incrementally map it. Several exploration strategies have been proposed in literature but their comparative evaluations are rare. In this paper, we experimentally compare some exploration strategies in order to contribute to assess their strengths and weaknesses.