# Frontier Based Exploration for Autonomous Robot

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1806.03581 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.03581/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2018.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [ImagineNav: Prompting Vision-Language Models as Embodied Navigator through Scene Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09874/) (2024)
- [End-to-End Navigation with Vision Language Models: Transforming Spatial Reasoning into Question-Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.05755/) (2024)
- [PanoNav: Mapless Zero-Shot Object Navigation with Panoramic Scene Parsing and Dynamic Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.06840/) (2025)
- [History-Augmented Vision-Language Models for Frontier-Based Zero-Shot Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16623/) (2025)
- [Embodied Crowd Counting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.08367/) (2025)
- [ImagineNav++: Prompting Vision-Language Models as Embodied Navigator through Scene Imagination](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.17435/) (2025)
- [A Probabilistic Programming Idiom for Active Knowledge Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.09555/) (2022)
- [Relational Semantic Reasoning on 3D Scene Graphs for Open World Interactive Object Search](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.05642/) (2026)
- [Autonomous Frontier-Based Exploration with VLM Guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.23165/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Exploration is process of selecting target points that yield the biggest contribution to a specific gain function at an initially unknown environment. Frontier-based exploration is the most common approach to exploration, wherein frontiers are regions on the boundary between open space and unexplored space. By moving to a new frontier, we can keep building the map of the environment, until there are no new frontiers left to detect. In this paper, an autonomous frontier-based exploration strategy, namely Wavefront Frontier Detector (WFD) is described and implemented on Gazebo Simulation Environment as well as on hardware platform, i.e. Kobuki TurtleBot using Robot Operating System (ROS). The advantage of this algorithm is that the robot can explore large open spaces as well as small cluttered spaces. Further, the map generated from this technique is compared and validated with the map generated using turtlebot_teleop ROS Package.