A simple NBV selection method for smoother
exploration of unknown environments
Adonisz Dimitriu
Department of Control Engineering
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Budapest, Hungary
d.adonisz96@gmail.com
Abstract—Next Best View (NBV) method
performs well in the autonomous
exploration of unknown environments. This
paper proposes a novel perspective for
selecting the next best position, that
effectively deals with corner-like segments
of the map and provides a smoother
exploration.
Index Terms—autonomous exploration,
NBV, search and rescue, surveillance
I. INTRODUCTION
Exploration, search and rescue operations,
disaster relief, and surveillance [1] are classical
applications of mobile robots, that have been
researched actively since robots have the
potentially to minimize the risks humans could
experience in dangerous or hardly accessible
environments. For these applications, the robot
Fig. 1: Occupancy grid map
Istvan Harmati
Department of Control Engineering
Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Budapest, Hungary
harmati@iit.bme.hu
needs to build a map of the environment in
order to execute different tasks in the region –
in some cases this task is the exploration itself.
Frontier-based exploration [2] moves the
robot towards the boundaries of the known
space. This approach has been widely
investigated, and proven to be an easy and
efficient way for dealing with unknown and
partially-known terrain.
Another group of exploration strategies is the
NBV method [3], which selects the next best
observation point for the robot to obtain the
most sensory information.
Information-based approaches [4] are one
of the most studied NBV selection methods in
the literature. It evaluates candidate positions
for the amount of expected new information and
chooses the one that maximizes the specified
utility function. The utility or cost function can
include many objectives, such as the
information gain, path-cost, and other factors
that characterize the importance of specific task
assignments at different locations [6][7]. The
common effort is to drive the robot towards the
area that yields a large amount of new space
during exploration. This paper introduces a
method that states the opposite: positions with
less new information are preferred as the NBV.
The rest of the article is structured as
follows. Section II describes the methodology,
that is used to compare the two objectives.
Section III provides the test results of the
comparison. Section IV concludes the article.
Section V: acknowledgment.
 Fig. 2: Comparison of performances in different
environments Fig. 3: Performance on 10%, 50%, 80% obstacle
concentration
II. METHODOLOGY
In the current study, an occupancy grid map the environment are preferred over large
is utilized to represent the 2D environment. In information gain areas. This approach provides
this representation, each grid has a probabilistic a smoother area coverage because agents do not
value of being occupied. Based on the need to revisit certain parts of the map (Fig. 4
occupation values, each cell is classified into 3 agains Fig. 5). For comparison, we adopt the
types of grid cells, which are occupied cells, free following information gain and position
cells, and unknown cells. An illustration of such a selection expressions from [5]:
map can be seen in Fig. 1. The robot is equipped
with a ring of sensors to detect obstacles in a Large-gain NBV Less-gain NBV
circular area (red dashed line) during the
𝐼(𝑝) = 𝐴(𝑝) ∙ 𝑒 −𝜆𝐿∗𝑐𝑝 𝐼(𝑝) = 𝐴(𝑝) ∙ 𝑒 𝜆𝑆 ∗𝑐𝑝
simulation.
𝑁𝐵𝑉𝐿 = argmax 𝐼(𝑝) 𝑁𝐵𝑉𝑆 = argmin 𝐼(𝑝)
Frontier-based exploration is motivated by 𝑝∈𝐹 𝑝∈𝐹

considering frontier cells 𝐹 (unknown cells that

where the information gain 𝐼(𝑝) consists of the
are adjacent to free cells), while information-
new expected area 𝐴(𝑝) at position 𝑝
based NBV algorithms rely on finding the next
discounted by its path-cost 𝑐𝑝 from the robot.
best position for the agent to efficiently explore
the environment. The best position is classically
defined by the information gain 𝐼(𝑝) of the
candidate positions 𝑝 – typically frontier cells –
discounted by the distance from the agent.
In the literature, many publications
emphasize utility functions that expect a large
amount of new space at the next best position
(large-gain NBV). The major disadvantage of
these approaches is that they tend to leave out
corner-like spaces in the environment, resulting
in low-resolution map segments, or in some
cases, agents must revisit these specific
locations for further exploration (Fig. 4). In this
paper, a counterintuitive approach is presented:
agents are oriented to frontier positions with
Fig.4: Large-gain NBV exploration
smaller expected information gain (less-gain
NBV). This means, that corner-like segments of
 a. b. c.

d. e. f.
Fig. 5: Less-gain NBV exploration steps

The path cost – calculated with A* algorithm – is Algorithm 1: EXPLORATION ALGORITHM

the traveling distance between the robot and
Initialize position 𝑝 of the robot
the respective position. 𝜆𝐿 and 𝜆𝑆 are the tuning
parameters of the path-cost, that are while there is any frontier cell
determined experimentally. Note, that these determine frontier cells 𝐹
utility functions are arbitrarily chosen and are
for each frontier cells 𝑓 ∈ 𝐹
anti-symmetric to each other to illuminate the
qualitative difference between the two opposite 𝑐𝑓 = 𝑑𝑖𝑠𝑡(𝑝, 𝑓) – with A*
perspectives. Algorithm 1 describes the whole
𝐴(𝑓) = 𝑐𝑎𝑙𝑐𝐸𝑥𝑝𝑒𝑐𝑡𝑒𝑑𝐴𝑟𝑒𝑎(𝑓)
exploration scheme in more details.
𝐴(𝑓) ∙ 𝑒 𝜆𝐿 𝑐𝑓 , 𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑁𝐵𝑉
III. TEST RESULTS 𝐼(𝑓) = {
𝐴(𝑓) ∙ 𝑒 −𝜆𝐿 𝑐𝑓 , 𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑒 𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑁𝐵𝑉
Fig. 2 reveals the overall performance of the end
two concepts in 120 different environments
argmax 𝐼(𝑓) , 𝑙𝑒𝑠𝑠 𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑁𝐵𝑉
with growing map size and increasing obstacle 𝑓∈𝐹
concentration. Each environment was randomly NBV = {
argmin 𝐼(𝑓) , 𝑙𝑎𝑟𝑔𝑒 𝑔𝑎𝑖𝑛 𝑁𝐵𝑉
generated multiple times, with the given 𝑓∈𝐹

parameters and their results were averaged. pathToNBV = 𝑝𝑎𝑡ℎ(𝑝, 𝑁𝐵𝑉) – with A*
𝑝 ← first step of pathToNBV
𝝀𝑳 𝝀𝑺
0.2 0.2 end
TABLE I: Parameters used in the algorithms
 As the figure illustrates, large-gain NBV
required more steps to complete the
exploration in all of the averaged instances. Fig.
3 reveals that with higher obstacle
concentration (that means more corners on the
map), the less-gain NBV performs increasingly
better, than the large-gain NBV scheme. Table I
shows the tuning parameters of the path-cost
utilized in the simulation.
Fig. 4 and Fig. 5 presents some phases of the
different NBV exploration in a highly crowded
environment. Note that at the bottom of the
map, the robot bypassed a region that could
potentally be a better choice (between b. and c.)
and had to return to the location at the end (e.
and f.). This was an unavoidable move, as the
agent does not see the full map (as we do), but
only the discovered regions: it preferred the
next location that was more „corner-like” at that
particular point. It is easy to tell which direction
to choose by looking at the whole map, but
perceiving only the fraction of it, makes it a hard
and problematic topic and is open for further
discussion.
IV. CONCLUSION
Executing operations in a short time are crucial
in many emergency situations, hence finding the
optimal trajectory is of high significance for
mobile robots. NBV selection is the most
common exploration strategy because it allows
a wide spectrum of heuristics to be involved in
the planning. Changing the perspective to less-
gain NBV provides the means to effectively deal
with corners of the map and at the same time, it
outperforms the concept of the large-gain NBV
selection in terms of exploration steps. The
proposed method achieves a smoother
exploration and can be easily adapted to other
utility functions.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The research presented in this paper, carried
out by BME was supported by the Ministry of
Innovation and the National Research,
Development and Innovation Office within the
framework of the Artificial Intelligence National
Laboratory Programme.
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