Robotic Exploration using Generalized Behavioral Entropy

Abstract: This work presents and evaluates a novel strategy for robotic exploration that leverages human models of uncertainty perception. To do this, we introduce a measure of uncertainty that we term "Behavioral entropy", which builds on Prelec's probability weighting from Behavioral Economics. We show that the new operator is an admissible generalized entropy, analyze its theoretical properties and compare it with other common formulations such as Shannon's and Renyi's. In particular, we discuss how the new formulation is more expressive in the sense of measures of sensitivity and perceptiveness to uncertainty introduced here. Then we use Behavioral entropy to define a new type of utility function that can guide a frontier-based environment exploration process. The approach's benefits are illustrated and compared in a Proof-of-Concept and ROS-Unity simulation environment with a Clearpath Warthog robot. We show that the robot equipped with Behavioral entropy explores faster than Shannon and Renyi entropies.