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

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.