Biasing Frontier-Based Exploration with Saliency Areas

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Luperto, Matteo, Stakanov, Valerii, Boracchi, Giacomo, Basilico, Nicola, Amigoni, Francesco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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_version_ 1866913991672987648
author Luperto, Matteo
Stakanov, Valerii
Boracchi, Giacomo
Basilico, Nicola
Amigoni, Francesco
author_facet Luperto, Matteo
Stakanov, Valerii
Boracchi, Giacomo
Basilico, Nicola
Amigoni, Francesco
contents Autonomous exploration is a widely studied problem where a robot incrementally builds a map of a previously unknown environment. The robot selects the next locations to reach using an exploration strategy. To do so, the robot has to balance between competing objectives, like exploring the entirety of the environment, while being as fast as possible. Most exploration strategies try to maximise the explored area to speed up exploration; however, they do not consider that parts of the environment are more important than others, as they lead to the discovery of large unknown areas. We propose a method that identifies \emph{saliency areas} as those areas that are of high interest for exploration, by using saliency maps obtained from a neural network that, given the current map, implements a termination criterion to estimate whether the environment can be considered fully-explored or not. We use saliency areas to bias some widely used exploration strategies, showing, with an extensive experimental campaign, that this knowledge can significantly influence the behavior of the robot during exploration.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_10689
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Biasing Frontier-Based Exploration with Saliency Areas
Luperto, Matteo
Stakanov, Valerii
Boracchi, Giacomo
Basilico, Nicola
Amigoni, Francesco
Robotics
Autonomous exploration is a widely studied problem where a robot incrementally builds a map of a previously unknown environment. The robot selects the next locations to reach using an exploration strategy. To do so, the robot has to balance between competing objectives, like exploring the entirety of the environment, while being as fast as possible. Most exploration strategies try to maximise the explored area to speed up exploration; however, they do not consider that parts of the environment are more important than others, as they lead to the discovery of large unknown areas. We propose a method that identifies \emph{saliency areas} as those areas that are of high interest for exploration, by using saliency maps obtained from a neural network that, given the current map, implements a termination criterion to estimate whether the environment can be considered fully-explored or not. We use saliency areas to bias some widely used exploration strategies, showing, with an extensive experimental campaign, that this knowledge can significantly influence the behavior of the robot during exploration.
title Biasing Frontier-Based Exploration with Saliency Areas
topic Robotics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.10689