Engineering Commons^™

Tangle-Free Exploration With A Tethered Mobile Robot, Danylo Shapovalov, Guilherme Pereira

Faculty & Staff Scholarship

Exploration and remote sensing with mobile robots is a well known field of research, but current solutions cannot be directly applied for tethered robots. In some applications, tethers may be very important to provide power or allow communication with the robot. This paper presents an exploration algorithm that guarantees complete exploration of arbitrary environments within the length constraint of the tether, while keeping the tether tangle-free at all times. While we also propose a generalized algorithm that can be used with several exploration strategies, our implementation uses a modified frontier-based exploration approach, where the robot chooses its next goal in …