Grid exploration robots with no visions and completely blind

Question

I am doing a research on how grid explorer robots move.
most articles are about robots with no vision but with sensors to see state of all surrounding cells, but my robot has really no vision and only can sense a cell after it could or failed to explore it(imagine the sensors are 4 pushed buttons that will be pushed when it hits the obstacles.)

I was hoping someone could lead me to some clues of how to find papers about this kind of robots. I am really having a hard time figuring out how to find related information.

Answer 1

If you have a priori knowledge of the environment, but imperfect ability to sense your location in the environment (and probably imperfect actions) then what you're describing may be a partially observable markov decision process (POMDP.) Your four-button sensor fits nicely into that idea.

If you don't even have prior knowledge of the environment, then you need to augment the POMDP notion with elements of exploration or machine learning.

Note that POMDPs are geared toward scenarios with "rewards", and that while POMDPs are pretty well understood, efficient solutions are still a topic of research. As are ML/POMDP hybrids.

Answer 2

Environmental exploration and traversal with just push-button sensors for obstacle awareness, and without priori knowledge sounds to me like a Simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) problem.

If I recall correctly, Roombas use this, so there should be a fair bit of study done on it in that regard.