Combined trajectory planning and gaze direction control for robotic exploration

In this paper, a control scheme that combines planning and gaze direction control for robotic exploration is presented. The objective is to calculate the gaze direction and simultaneously plan the trajectory of the robot over a given time horizon, so that localization and map estimation errors are minimized while the unknown environment is explored. Most existing approaches perform a greedy optimization for the trajectory generation only over the next time step and usually neglect the limited field of view of visual sensors and consequently the need for gaze direction control. In the proposed approach an information-based objective function is used, in order to perform multiple step planning of robot motion, which quantifies a trade-off between localization, map accuracy and exploration. Relative entropy is used as an information metric for the gaze direction control. The result is an intelligent exploring mobile robot, which produces an accurate model of the environment and can cope with very uncertain robot models and sensor measurements.