Autonomous exploration of mobile robots via deep reinforcement learning based on spatiotemporal information on graph

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of autonomous exploration in unknown environments for ground mobile robots with deep reinforcement learning (DRL). To effectively explore unknown environments, we construct an exploration graph considering historical trajectories, frontier waypoints, landmarks, and obstacles. Meanwhile, to take full advantage of the spatiotemporal feature and historical information in the autonomous exploration task, we propose a novel network called Spatiotemporal Neural Network on Graph (Graph-STNN). Specifically, the proposed Graph-STNN extracts the spatial feature using graph convolutional network (GCN) and the temporal feature using temporal convolutional network (TCN). Then, gated recurrent unit (GRU) is performed to synthesize the spatial feature, the temporal feature, and the historical state information into the current state feature. Combined with DRL, our Graph-STNN helps estimation of the optimal target point through extracted hybrid features. The simulation experiment shows that our approach is more effective than the GCN-based approach and the information entropy-based approach. Moreover, Graph-STNN also performs better generalization ability than GCN-based, information entropy-based, and random methods. Finally, we validate our approach on the simulation platform Stage with the actual robot model.