Exploration Strategies for a Robot with a Continously Rotating 3D Scanner

To benchmark the efficiency of exploration strategies one has to use robot simulators. In an exploration task, the robot faces an unknown environment. Of course one could test the algorithm in different real-world scenarios, but a competitive strategy must have good performance in any environment that can be systematically constructed inside a simulator. This paper presents an evaluation of exploration strategies we developed for a specific sensor. A continously rotating 3D laser scanner that scans only into one direction at a time moves through the environment sampling the surrounding. Our evaluation framework features an efficient scanning and robot simulator for kinematic feasible trajectories. We will show that shorter trajectories do not necessarily imply quicker exploration. A simple simulator framework is sufficient for evaluating these properties of path planning algorithms.