Optimality and Guarantees in Robotic Exploration

Guaranteeing effective exploration is a vital component in the success of robotic
applications in ocean and space exploration, environmental monitoring, and search and rescue
tasks. This talk presents a novel formulation of exploration that permits optimality criteria and
performance guarantees in exploration. We define the problem of exploration as a coverage
problem on continuous (infinite dimensional) spaces based on ergodic theory and derive
notions of optimality and guarantees such as asymptotic coverage, set invariance, time
optimality, and reachability on exploration tasks. Furthermore, we demonstrate successful
execution of the approach on physical robotic systems.

Organized by:

K.S. Narendra, Professor (Emeritus) of Electrical Engineering and Director, Center for
Systems Science