Autonomous Exploration-Based Precise Mapping for Mobile Robots through Stepwise and Consistent Motions

Abstract: This paper presents an autonomous exploration framework. It is designed for indoor ground mobile robots that utilize laser Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM), ensuring process completeness and precise mapping results. For frontier search, the local-global sampling architecture based on multiple Rapidly Exploring Random Trees (RRTs) is employed. Traversability checks during RRT expansion and global RRT pruning upon map updates eliminate unreachable frontiers, reducing potential collisions and deadlocks. Adaptive sampling density adjustments, informed by obstacle distribution, enhance exploration coverage potential. For frontier point navigation, a stepwise consistent motion strategy is adopted, wherein the robot strictly drives straight on approximately equidistant line segments in the polyline path and rotates in place at segment junctions. This simplified, decoupled motion pattern improves scan-matching stability and mitigates map drift. For process control, the framework serializes frontier point selection and navigation, avoiding oscillation caused by frequent goal changes in conventional parallelized processes. The waypoint retracing mechanism is introduced to generate repeated observations, triggering loop closure detection and backend optimization in graph-based SLAM, thereby improving map consistency and precision. Experiments in both simulation and real-world scenarios validate the effectiveness of the framework. It achieves improved mapping coverage and precision in more challenging environments compared to baseline 2D exploration algorithms. It also shows robustness in supporting resource-constrained robot platforms and maintaining mapping consistency across various LiDAR field-of-view (FoV) configurations.