An experiment in integrated exploration

Integrated exploration strategy advocated in this paper refers to a tight coupling between the tasks of localization, mapping, and motion control and the effect of this coupling on the overall effectiveness of an exploration strategy. Our approach to exploration calls for a balanced evaluation of alternative motion actions from the point of view of information gain, localization quality, and navigation cost. To provide a uniform basis of comparison of localization quality between different locations, a “localizability” metric is introduced. It is based on the estimate of the lowest vehicle pose covariance attainable from a given location.