This paper presents an algorithm for active exploration of the environment by a mobile robot when performing global localization. During the localization process interesting regions for future exploration are selected based on already detected features and on the hypotheses generated by the localization algorithm. The localization process is improved by presenting it a richer set of features. T...

Virtual worlds exploration techniques are used in a wide variety of domains — from graph drawing to robot motion. This paper is dedicated to virtual world exploration techniques which have to help a human being to understand a 3D scene. An improved method of a viewpoint quality estimation is presented in the paper, together with a new method for an automatic 3D scene exploration, based on a vir...

– The preliminary design space exploration for large, interdisciplinary engineering problems is often a difficult and time-consuming task. General techniques are needed that efficiently and methodically search the design space. This work focuses on the use of parallel load balancing techniques integrated with a global optimizer to reduce the computational time of the design space exploration. T...

Computing globally optimal motion plans for a robot is challenging in part because it requires analyzing a robot’s configuration space simultaneously from both a macroscopic viewpoint (i.e., considering paths in multiple homotopic classes) and a microscopic viewpoint (i.e., locally optimizing path quality). We introduce Interleaved Optimization with Sampling-based Motion Planning (IOS-MP), a ne...

It is widely believed that in order to solve large scale global optimization problems an appropriate mixture of local approximation and global exploration is necessary. Local approximation, if first order information on the objective function is available, is efficiently performed by means of local optimization methods. Unfortunately, global exploration, in absence of some kind of global inform...

The problem of coverage without a priori global information about the environment is a key element of the general exploration problem. Applications vary from exploration of the Mars surface to the urban search and rescue (USAR) domain, where neither a map, nor a Global Positioning System (GPS) are available. We propose two algorithms for solving the 2D coverage problem using multiple mobile rob...

The increased availability and fidelity of broadband seismic instruments have played a key role in bridging the gap between exploration and global seismic applications. Long gone are the days when global structure mapping and source characterization/monitoring relied on the manual digitization of WWSSN (World-Wide Standard Seismographic Network) analogue records or hours in front of microfiche ...

We study the following scenario of online graph exploration. A team of k agents is initially located at a distinguished vertex r of an undirected graph. At every time step, each agent can traverse an edge of the graph. All vertices have unique identifiers, and upon entering a vertex, an agent obtains the list of identifiers of all its neighbors. We ask how many time steps are required to comple...

In this paper we propose a method to use the concept of natural boundaries in the exploration decisions of an autonomous robot on a virtual disaster site. The algorithm we created is based upon various methods from image morphology. By estimating the size of exploration frontiers we show that it’s possible to have global exploration algorithm.