The authors of this paper present a comprehensive bibliometric analysis of mobile robots for exploration, charting the evolution of research activity over the past decade and a half. By combining data from multiple scholarly databases with advanced visualization tools, the study marries quantitative rigor with qualitative insight, revealing how navigation, mapping and hybrid design themes intersect and diverge. The multi-layered methodology – based on co-occurrence and co-citation networks – affords a clear view of the field’s structure and highlights underexplored niches without limiting the scope to any single class of platform. The paper details the search strategy, the analytical framework and discusses the implications of publication trends, geographic distribution and thematic clustering for the future development of autonomous exploratory systems.