This paper explores two enhancements that can be made to single and multiple robot exploration in graph-like worlds. One enhancement considers the order in which potential places are explored and another considers the exploitation of local neighbor information to help disam-biguate possible locations. Empirical evaluations show that both enhancements can produce a significant reduction in exploration effort in terms of the number of mechanical steps required over the original exploration algorithms and that for some environments up to 60 % reduction in mechan-ical steps can be achieved. 1.

This paper describes a technique that allows mobile robots to explore an unknown graph-like environment and con-struct a topological map of it. The robots explore in a “lazy ” fashion in which identified “hard ” tasks are put off to later steps taking advantage of the fact that certain tasks often become easier as more of the world is known. Ex-perimental validation shows that multiple robots exploring in a lazy fashion can produce a reduction in exploration effort over multiple robots exploring without prioritizing tasks based on expected effort.