GuangMing-Explorer: A Four-Legged Robot Platform for Autonomous Exploration in General Environments

TL;DR

GuangMing-Explorer is a fully integrated four-legged robot platform designed for autonomous exploration across diverse and unstructured environments, demonstrating robustness and efficiency through extensive real-world experiments.

Contribution

This work introduces a comprehensive hardware-software platform for autonomous exploration, filling the gap in holistic systems capable of operating in complex environments.

Findings

Effective in diverse environments

Robust and efficient exploration performance

Potential for practical deployment

Abstract

Autonomous exploration is a fundamental capability that tightly integrates perception, planning, control, and motion execution. It plays a critical role in a wide range of applications, including indoor target search, mapping of extreme environments, resource exploration, etc. Despite significant progress in individual components, a holistic and practical description of a completely autonomous exploration system, encompassing both hardware and software, remains scarce. In this paper, we present GuangMing-Explorer, a fully integrated autonomous exploration platform designed for robust operation across diverse environments. We provide a comprehensive overview of the system architecture, including hardware design, software stack, algorithm deployment, and experimental configuration. Extensive real-world experiments demonstrate the platform's effectiveness and efficiency in executing autonomous exploration tasks, highlighting its potential for practical deployment in complex and unstructured environments.