15.1 Motivation

This chapter describes a brief digression from autonomous exploration into human-guided exploration. The results in Chapter 14 showed Supervised Wall-Following to be an effective exploration strategy in environments with occlusion and traps. It was not, however, significantly better than simple wall-following in the ‘Empty’ environment. This raised the question:

Is it possible to improve the exploration performance in the ‘Empty’ environment or is Supervised Wall Following generating the best possible results, given the physical robot and its sensors?

To answer this question, experiments were performed to see whether a human operator, guided only by the developing map, could direct ARNE's movements so as to produce better results than Supervised Wall-Following. Similar experiments were performed in the more complicated ‘Walls’ environment.

15.2 Procedure

The exploration software includes an X-Windows interface which enables an operator to send commands (‘move forward’, ‘turn left’, ‘turn right’, and ‘scan’) directly to ARNE. This interface was used in the experiments described in this section. The interface also has the facility for the user to indicate, using the mouse, a position on the map to which ARNE should move. The system then plans and executes such a path. This facility was used for the longer movements between regions of interest.

Consideration was given to the choice of operator for these experiments. It was felt that a volunteer would have no experience of the way in which ARNE senses the world and builds the map and would therefore be unable to explore efficiently.