Comparative Study of Algorithms for Frontier based Area Exploration and Slam for Mobile Robots

Abstract

Exploration strategies are used to guide mobile robots for map building. Usually, exploration strategies work greedily by evaluating a number of candidate observations on the basis of a utility function and selecting the best one. The core challenge in area exploration is to deploy a large number of robots in an unknown environment, map the environment and establishing an efficient communication between the robots. Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) comes in to add more accuracy and heuristics to the generic area exploration strategies. Addition to SLAM algorithms will improve the performance of the exploration process and map building to a great extend. In this paper a survey of existing approaches in frontier based area exploration and various SLAM algorithms which can be useful for the process of area exploration are discussed.