Frontier exploration, running in your browser

Recon is a live visualization of frontier-based exploration, the technique real mobile robots use to map a space they have never seen. There is no pre-known grid: the robot builds its own map purely from what its simulated sensor sweeps, and every step it has to decide where to look next. Press Start and the fog above peels back cell by cell as the robot works.

A frontier is the boundary between mapped-free space and the unknown: any free cell that still touches an unexplored one. Recon detects those frontiers live, groups the adjacent ones into regions, and scores each region by how large and how close it is. The robot commits to the best region, plans a path to it through space it has already mapped, sweeps, and repeats until nothing unknown is reachable. Because the choice is driven by the map rather than a script, no two seeds explore the same way.

Questions

What is frontier-based exploration?

A strategy for exploring an unknown map by repeatedly heading to the nearest useful frontier, the edge between what you have mapped and what you have not. It is a standard building block of autonomous robot mapping and SLAM.

Does the robot know the map in advance?

No. It only knows what its sensor has swept. The rendering draws the robot's own belief grid, so what you see on screen is exactly what the robot knows, never the hidden ground truth.

Is the map the same every time?

Each map is generated from a seed. The same seed and size always produce the same map, so a run you like can be reproduced. Press New map for a fresh random seed, or type your own.

Does it make sound?

Yes. Each sweep, frontier lock, step, and completion plays a short tone synthesized in code with the Web Audio API, so there are no audio files. The mute toggle is remembered between visits.

Is Recon open source?

Yes, it is MIT licensed. The simulation core and this page are on GitHub.