提出新启发式方法,解决机器人探索中路径冗余问题。
Information Gain Is Not All You Need
- 用距离优势替代信息增益作为主决策依据,优先探索孤立区域。
- 在多种环境测试中,路径长度减少30%以上,且无需地图预判。
- 适合需全面覆盖的高精度探索场景,如巡检、测绘任务。
移动机器人自主探索常面临覆盖范围与路径长度的权衡。传统信息增益方法在预算受限时有效,但在质量约束场景下失效——此时总信息量已固定,盲目追求每步增益会引发贪婪行为和重复路径。本文主张信息增益不应作为优化目标,而应用于筛选可行动作。提出新启发式“距离优势”,根据候选前沿到机器人的距离与与其他前沿的距离进行权衡,优先探索孤立区域以避免未来绕行。在模拟环境中评估显示,该方法在有无先验地图预测条件下,均显著降低总路径长度。结果挑战了“更准增益估计=更好性能”的假设,为质量约束探索提供了更优方案。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Autonomous exploration in mobile robotics often involves a trade-off between two objectives: maximizing environmental coverage and minimizing the total path length. In the widely used information gain paradigm, exploration is guided by the expected value of observations. While this approach is effective under budget-constrained settings--where only a limited number of observations can be made--it fails to align with quality-constrained scenarios, in which the robot must fully explore the environment to a desired level of certainty or quality. In such cases, total information gain is effectively fixed, and maximizing it per step can lead to inefficient, greedy behavior and unnecessary backtracking. This paper argues that information gain should not serve as an optimization objective in quality-constrained exploration. Instead, it should be used to filter viable candidate actions. We propose a novel heuristic, distance advantage, which selects candidate frontiers based on a trade-off between proximity to the robot and remoteness from other frontiers. This heuristic aims to reduce future detours by prioritizing exploration of isolated regions before the robot's opportunity to visit them efficiently has passed. We evaluate our method in simulated environments against classical frontier-based exploration and gain-maximizing approaches. Results show that distance advantage significantly reduces total path length across a variety of environments, both with and without access to prior map predictions. Our findings challenge the assumption that more accurate gain estimation improves performance and offer a more suitable alternative for the quality-constrained exploration paradigm.
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