# Autonomous Exploration and Mapping for Mobile Robots via Cumulative Curriculum Reinforcement Learning

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel curriculum reinforcement learning framework with a new state representation and a lightweight simulator to enhance autonomous exploration and mapping efficiency for mobile robots, addressing sample efficiency and adaptability issues.

## Contribution

It proposes the Cumulative Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (CCRL) framework, a new state representation, and a lightweight simulator to improve DRL-based robot exploration and mapping.

## Key findings

- CCRL mitigates catastrophic forgetting in DRL models.
- CCRL improves sample efficiency and generalization.
- The lightweight simulator accelerates training significantly.

## Abstract

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has been widely applied in autonomous exploration and mapping tasks, but often struggles with the challenges of sampling efficiency, poor adaptability to unknown map sizes, and slow simulation speed. To speed up convergence, we combine curriculum learning (CL) with DRL, and first propose a Cumulative Curriculum Reinforcement Learning (CCRL) training framework to alleviate the issue of catastrophic forgetting faced by general CL. Besides, we present a novel state representation, which considers a local egocentric map and a global exploration map resized to the fixed dimension, so as to flexibly adapt to environments with various sizes and shapes. Additionally, for facilitating the fast training of DRL models, we develop a lightweight grid-based simulator, which can substantially accelerate simulation compared to popular robot simulation platforms such as Gazebo. Based on the customized simulator, comprehensive experiments have been conducted, and the results show that the CCRL framework not only mitigates the catastrophic forgetting problem, but also improves the sample efficiency and generalization of DRL models, compared to general CL as well as without a curriculum. Our code is available at https://github.com/BeamanLi/CCRL_Exploration.