A meta-heuristic based goal-selection strategy for mobile robot search in an unknown environment

• Published in: Computers & operations research Vol. 84; pp. 178 - 187
• Main Authors: Kulich, Miroslav, Miranda-Bront, Juan José, Přeučil, Libor
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: New York Elsevier Ltd 01.08.2017; Pergamon Press Inc
• Subjects: Adaptive search techniques; Computer simulation; Exploration; Feasibility; Graph Search Problem; GRASP; Heuristic methods; Intelligent agents; Mobile robotics; Operations research; Robotic search; Searching; Strategy; Trajectories; Traveling Deliveryman Problem; Robotic search; Graph Search Problem; Mobile robotics; GRASP; Traveling Deliveryman Problem
• ISSN: 0305-0548; 1873-765X; 0305-0548
• DOI: 10.1016/j.cor.2016.04.029

The single-robot search problem in an unknown environment is defined as the problem of finding a stationary object in the environment whose map is not known a priori. Compared to exploration, the only difference lies in goal selection as the objectives of search and exploration are dissimilar, i.e. a trajectory that is optimal in exploration does not necessarily minimize the expected value of the time to find an object along it. For this reason, in this paper we extend the preliminary ideas presented in Kulich et al. [1] to a general framework that accounts for the particular characteristics of the search problem. Within this framework, an important decision involved in the determination of the trajectory can be formulated as an instance of the Graph Search Problem (GSP), a generalization of the well-known Traveling Deliveryman Problem (TDP) which has not received much attention in the literature. We developed a tailored Greedy Randomized Adaptive Search Procedure (GRASP) meta-heuristic for the GSP, which generates good quality solutions in very short computing times and is incorporated in the overall framework. The proposed approach produces very good results in a simulation environment, showing that it is feasible from a computational standpoint and the proposed strategy outperforms the standard approaches. •We study the single-robot search problem in an unknown environment.•We propose a goal selection strategy based on the solution of a Graph Search Problem.•We propose GRASP meta-heuristic to obtain good solutions in short computing times.•The proposed goal selection strategy outperforms strategies taken from exploration.