Autonomously Exploring and Mapping a Complex 3D Environment with an Aerial Vehicle

Video shows an aerial vehicle autonomously exploring and mapping a complex 3D environment on Carnegie Mellon University campus. The exploration algorithm uses a hierarchy, planning detailed smooth paths within a local area surrounding the vehicle (green box) and at the same time keeping additional areas to explore (green blocks) on the global scale. The algorithm produces high efficiency in terms of time complexity and navigation patterns for exploration. The vehicle runs onboard state estimation and mapping leveraging range, vision, and inertial sensing, and local planning for collision avoidance. All processing is real-time and no post-processing involved. The vehicle flies at 2.5m/s through the exploration run.

Paper references:
C. Cao, H. Zhu, Z. Ren, H. Choset, and J. Zhang. Representation Granularity Enables Time-Efficient Autonomous Exploration in Large, Complex Worlds. Science Robotics. vol. 8, no. 80, 2023.
C. Cao, H. Zhu, H. Choset, and J. Zhang. TARE: A Hierarchical Framework for Efficiently Exploring Complex 3D Environments. Robotics: Science and Systems Conference (RSS). Virtual, July 2021.
C. Cao, H. Zhu, F. Yang, Y. Xia, H. Choset, J. Oh, and J. Zhang. Autonomous Exploration Development Environment and the Planning Algorithms. IEEE Intl. Conf. on Robotics and Automation (ICRA). Philadelphia, PA, May 2022.
J. Zhang, C. Hu, R. Gupta Chadha, and S. Singh. Falco: Fast Likelihood-based Collision Avoidance with Extension to Human-guided Navigation. Journal of Field Robotics. vol. 37, no. 8, pp. 1300–1313, 2020.
J. Zhang and S. Singh. Laser-visual-inertial Odometry and Mapping with High Robustness and Low Drift. Journal of Field Robotics. vol. 35, no. 8, pp. 1242–1264, 2018.

Autonomous Exploration Development Environment:
https://www.cmu-exploration.com

Ground-based Exploration - TARE Planner:
https://www.cmu-exploration.com/tare-...

Aerial Exploration - A-TARE Planner:
https://www.cmu-exploration.com/a-tar...

Author websites:
http://caochao.me
http://www.hongbiaoz.com
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~choset
https://frc.ri.cmu.edu/~zhangji