Autonomous exploration through deep reinforcement learning

Purpose Robots equipped with LiDAR sensors can continuously perform efficient actions for mapping tasks to gradually build maps. However, with the complexity and scale of the environment increasing, the computation cost is extremely steep. This study aims to propose a hybrid autonomous exploration method that makes full use of LiDAR data, shortens the computation time in the decision-making process and improves efficiency. The experiment proves that this method is feasible. Design/methodology/approach This study improves the mapping update module and proposes a full-mapping approach that fully exploits the LiDAR data. Under the same hardware configuration conditions, the scope of the mapping is expanded, and the information obtained is increased. In addition, a decision-making module based on reinforcement learning method is proposed, which can select the optimal or near-optimal perceptual action by the learned policy. The decision-making module can shorten the computation time of the decision-making process and improve the efficiency of decision-making. Findings The result shows that the hybrid autonomous exploration method offers good performance, which combines the learn-based policy with traditional frontier-based policy. Originality/value This study proposes a hybrid autonomous exploration method, which combines the learn-based policy with traditional frontier-based policy. Extensive experiment including real robots is conducted to evaluate the performance of the approach and proves that this method is feasible.