This article presents a comprehensive review of the Active Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (A-SLAM) research conducted over the past decade. It explores the formulation, applications, and methodologies employed in A-SLAM, particularly in trajectory generation and control-action selection, drawing on concepts from Information Theory (IT) and the Theory of Optimal Experimental Design (TOED). This review includes both qualitative and quantitative analyses of various approaches, deployment scenarios, configurations, path-planning methods, and utility functions within A-SLAM research. Furthermore, this article introduces a novel analysis of Active Collaborative SLAM (AC-SLAM), focusing on collaborative aspects within SLAM systems. It includes a thorough examination of collaborative parameters and approaches, supported by both qualitative and statistical assessments. This study also identifies limitations in the existing literature and suggests potential avenues for future research. This survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking insights into A-SLAM methods and techniques, offering a current overview of A-SLAM formulation.

Autonomous exploration in unknown environments remains a fundamental challenge in robotics, particularly for applications such as search and rescue, industrial inspection, and planetary exploration. Multi-robot active SLAM presents a promising solution by enabling collaborative mapping and exploration while actively reducing uncertainty. However, existing approaches often suffer from high computational costs and inefficient frontier management, making them computationally expensive for real-time applications. In this paper, we introduce an efficient multi-robot active SLAM framework that incorporates a frontier-sharing strategy to enhance robot distribution in unexplored environments. Our approach integrates a utility function that considers both pose graph uncertainty and path entropy, achieving an optimal balance between exploration coverage and computational efficiency. By filtering and prioritizing goal frontiers, our method significantly reduces computational overhead while preserving high mapping accuracy. The proposed framework has been implemented in ROS and validated through simulations and real-world experiments. Results demonstrate superior exploration performance and mapping quality compared to state-of-the-art approaches.

In this article we present a utility function for Active SLAM (A-SLAM) which utilizes map entropy along with D-Optimality criterion metrices for weighting goal frontier candidates. We propose a utility function for frontier goal selection that exploits the occupancy grid map by utilizing the path entropy and favors unknown map locations for maximum area coverage while maintaining a low localization and mapping uncertainties. We quantify the efficiency of our method using various graph connectivity matrices and map efficiency indexes for an environment exploration task. Using simulation and experimental results against similar approaches we achieve an average of 32% more coverage using publicly available data sets.