Mobile Robot Exploration in Unknown Environment using Hybrid Map

Mobile robot has the exploration function in order to perform its own task. Robot exploration can be used in many applications such as surveillance, rescue and resource detection. The workspace that robots performed in was complicated or quite wide, the multi search using the several mobile robots was mainly used. In this paper, we proposed a scheme that all areas are searched for by using one robot. The method to be proposed extract a area that can be explored in the workspace then the robot investigates the area and updates the map at the same time. The explored area is saved as a hybrid map that combines the nice attributes of the grid and topological maps. The robot can produce the safe navigation route without the obstacles by using hybrid map. The proposed hybrid map uses less memory than a grid map, but it can be used for complete coverage with the same efficiency of a topological map. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme can generate a map of an environment with only 6% of the memory that a grid map requires.