An Efficient Sampling-based Method for Online Informative Path Planning in Unknown Environments

09/20/2019
by   Lukas Schmid, et al.
10

The ability to plan informative paths online is essential to robot autonomy. In particular, sampling-based approaches are often used as they are capable of using arbitrary information gain formulations. However, they are prone to local minima, resulting in sub-optimal trajectories, and sometimes do not reach global coverage. In this paper, we present a new RRT*-inspired online informative path planning algorithm. Our method continuously expands a single tree of candidate trajectories and rewires segments to maintain the tree and refine intermediate trajectories. This allows the algorithm to achieve global coverage and maximize the utility of a path in a global context, using a single objective function. We demonstrate the algorithm's capabilities in the applications of autonomous indoor exploration as well as accurate Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF)-based 3D reconstruction on-board a Micro Aerial vehicle (MAV). We study the impact of commonly used information gain and cost formulations in these scenarios and propose a novel TSDF-based 3D reconstruction gain and cost-utility formulation. Detailed evaluation in realistic simulation environments show that our approach outperforms state of the art methods in these tasks. Experiments on a real MAV demonstrate the ability of our method to robustly plan in real-time, exploring an indoor environment solely with on-board sensing and computation. We make our framework available for future research.

READ FULL TEXT

page 1

page 5

page 6

page 7

page 8

research
11/19/2021

Online Coverage Planning for an Autonomous Weed Mowing Robot with Curvature Constraints

The land used for grazing cattle takes up about one-third of the land in...
research
08/17/2022

Incremental 3D Scene Completion for Safe and Efficient Exploration Mapping and Planning

Exploration of unknown environments is a fundamental problem in robotics...
research
03/17/2021

Online Informative Path Planning for Active Information Gathering of a 3D Surface

This paper presents an online informative path planning approach for act...
research
09/22/2022

SEER: Safe Efficient Exploration for Aerial Robots using Learning to Predict Information Gain

We address the problem of efficient 3-D exploration in indoor environmen...
research
09/27/2022

Efficient View Path Planning for Autonomous Implicit Reconstruction

Implicit neural representations have shown promising potential for the 3...
research
11/09/2022

A Graph-Based Approach to Generate Energy-Optimal Robot Trajectories in Polygonal Environments

As robotic systems continue to address emerging issues in areas such as ...
research
09/04/2018

JobComposer: Career Path Optimization via Multicriteria Utility Learning

With online professional network platforms (OPNs, e.g., LinkedIn, Xing, ...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset