RRT* (Rapidly exploring Random Tree*) based algorithms are widely used for path planning. Informed RRT* uses RRT* for generating an initial path and optimizes the path by limiting sampling regions to the area around the initial path. RRT* algorithms have several limitations such as slow convergence speed, large memory requirements, and difficulties in finding paths when narrow aisles or doors exist. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to deal with these problems. The proposed algorithm applies the image skeletonization to the gridmap image for generating an initial path. Because this initial path is close to the optimal cost path even in the complex environments, the cost can converge to the optimum more quickly in the proposed algorithm than in the conventional Informed RRT*. Also, we can reduce the number of nodes and memory requirement. The performance of the proposed algorithm is verified by comparison with the conventional Informed RRT* and Informed RRT* using initial path generated by A*.

A local map-based exploration algorithm for mobile robots is presented. Segmented frontiers and their relative transformations constitute a tree structure. By the proposed efficient frontier segmentation and a local map management method, a robot can reduce the unknown area and update the local grid map which is assigned to each frontier node. Although this local map-based exploration method uses only local maps and their adjacent node information, mapping completion and efficiency can be greatly improved by merging and updating the frontier nodes. Also, we suggest appropriate graph search exploration methods for corridor and hall environments. The simulation demonstrates that the entire environment can be represented by well-distributed frontier nodes.