Safe autonomous exploration of unknown environments is an essential skill for mobile robots to effectively and adaptively perform environmental mapping for diverse critical tasks. Due to its simplicity, most existing exploration methods rely on the standard frontier-based exploration strategy, which directs a robot to the boundary between the known safe and the unknown unexplored spaces to acquire new information about the environment. This typically follows a recurrent persistent planning strategy, first selecting an informative frontier viewpoint, then moving the robot toward the selected viewpoint until reaching it, and repeating these steps until termination. However, exploration with persistent planning may lack adaptivity to continuously updated maps, whereas highly adaptive exploration with online planning often suffers from high computational costs and potential issues with livelocks. In this paper, as an alternative to less-adaptive persistent planning and costly online planning, we introduce a new proactive preventive replanning strategy for effective exploration using the immediately available actionable information at a viewpoint to avoid redundant, uninformative last-mile exploration motion. We also use the actionable information of a viewpoint as a systematic termination criterion for exploration. To close the gap between perception and action, we perform safe and informative path planning that minimizes the risk of collision with detected obstacles and the distance to unexplored regions, and we apply action-aware viewpoint selection with maximal information utility per total navigation cost. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our action-aware proactive exploration method in numerical simulations and hardware experiments.

Safe and smooth robot motion around obstacles is an essential skill for autonomous robots, especially when operating around people and other robots. Conventionally, due to real-time operation requirements and onboard computation limitations, many robot motion planning and control methods follow a two-step approach: first construct a (e.g., piecewise linear) collision-free reference path for a simplified robot model, and then execute the reference plan via path-following control for a more accurate and complex robot model. A challenge of such a decoupled robot motion planning and control method for highly dynamic robotic systems is ensuring the safety of path-following control as well as the successful completion of the reference plan. In this paper, we introduce a novel dynamical systems approach for online closed-loop time parametrization, called $\textit{a time governor}$, of a reference path for provably correct and safe path-following control based on feedback motion prediction, where the safety of robot motion under path-following control is continuously monitored using predicted robot motion. After introducing the general framework of time governors for safe path following, we present an example application for the fully actuated high-order robot dynamics using proportional-and-higher-order-derivative (PhD) path-following control whose feedback motion prediction is performed by Lyapunov ellipsoids and Vandemonde simplexes. In numerical simulations, we investigate the role of reference position and velocity feedback, and motion prediction on path-following performance and robot motion.