Piecemeal Graph Exploration by a Mobile Robot

We study how a mobile robot can learn an unknown environment in a piecemeal manner The robot s goal is to learn a complete map of its environment while satisfying the constraint that it must return every so often to its starting position for refueling say The environment is modeled as an arbitrary undirected graph which is initially unknown to the robot We assume that the robot can distinguish vertices and edges that it has already explored We present a surprisingly e cient algorithm for piecemeal learning an unknown undirected graph G V E in which the robot explores every vertex and edge in the graph by traversing at most O E V o edges This nearly linear algorithm improves on the best previous algorithm in which the robot traverses at most O E V edges We also give an application of piecemeal learning to the problem of searching a graph for a treasure