Exploration driven by local potential distortions

Boundary Value Problem (BVP) Path Planners generate potential fields whose gradient descent represents navigational routes from any point of the environment to a goal position. The resulting trajectories are smooth and free of local minima. A BVP planner has been recently used to compute trajectories in known inhomogeneous environments, corresponding to different degrees of traveling difficulties. In this case, we locally distort the potential field generating regions with high or low preferences for navigating. In this paper, we extend this idea, generating an strategy allowing the robot to explore an unknown environment dynamically considering environment preferences. Several experiments demonstrate that our method can be used as a core in an integrated exploration approach.