RB5 Low-Cost Explorer: Implementing Autonomous Long-Term Exploration on Low-Cost Robotic Hardware

This systems paper presents the implementation and design of RB5, a wheeled robot for autonomous long-term exploration with fewer and cheaper sensors. Requiring just an RGB-D camera and low-power computing hardware, the system consists of an experimental platform with rocker-bogie suspen- sion. It operates in unknown and GPS-denied environments and on indoor and outdoor terrains. The exploration consists of a methodology that extends frontier- and sampling-based exploration with a path-following vector field and a state-of- the-art SLAM algorithm. The methodology allows the robot to explore its surroundings at lower update frequencies, enabling the use of lower-performing and lower-cost hardware while still retaining good autonomous performance. The approach further consists of a methodology to interact with a remotely located human operator based on an inexpensive long-range and low-power communication technology from the internet-of- things domain (i.e., LoRa) and a customized communication protocol. The results and the feasibility analysis show the possible applications and limitations of the approach. Code—The open-source software stack is made available on the project repository webpage†.