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Roadmap Explorer

  • Software
  • Navigation and mapping
  • Library

A ROS 2 module for robot exploration of unknown areas, built on frontier exploration with a roadmap, meant to work with Nav2 and SLAM for ground robots.

Source on GitHub: github.com/suchetanrs/roadmap-explorer (opens in a new tab). Facts read at commit 203ff26 (opens in a new tab).

Licenses

Code
Apache-2.0 (opens in a new tab)

Read by Robotheca from LICENSE (opens in a new tab) (Apache-2.0) at commit 203ff26 (opens in a new tab), on 16 Oct 2026.

Commercial use
Yes

What it does

  • Provides end-to-end support for running with Nav2, including lifecycle handling and a behavior tree plugin for custom behavior trees.
  • Builds a structured roadmap so exploration takes less time than several greedy frontier and sampling-based approaches it compares against.
  • Can save and restore exploration sessions, including the explored map and the roadmap, to continue exploring later.
  • Supports exploring in localisation-only mode with configurable field-of-view settings.
  • Ships an RViz plugin to start, pause, continue, save, and load exploration sessions.
  • Includes a mode that aligns the frontier roadmap with the SLAM pose graph after major loop closures.

Written by Robotheca from the project's README (opens in a new tab) at commit 203ff26.

Getting started

Difficulty
Intermediate
Hardware it needs, as the project states it
Tested on a Jetson Xavier-class platform, where regular exploration used about 10% of one CPU core and spiked to 20-25% during global repositioning.

Maintenance

Status
Maintained: a commit in the last 12 months
Newest commit
6 Jul 2026 on main
Latest release
None published on GitHub

Checked on GitHub on 16 Oct 2026.

Links

Robots that can run it

No robot on Robotheca is linked to it yet. Links come from a robot's robot.yaml, from its dependency files read as text, or from Robotheca's editors.

Robotheca lists software as a reference: nothing is hosted or run here, and every fact links to where it was read.