In our work, we extend the current state-of-the-art approach for autonomous multi-UAV exploration to consumer-level UAVs, such as the DJI Mini 3 Pro. We propose a pipeline that selects viewpoint pairs from which the depth can be estimated and plans the trajectory that satisfies motion constraints necessary for odometry estimation. For the multi-UAV exploration, we propose a semi-distributed communication scheme that distributes the workload in a balanced manner. We evaluate our model performance in simulation for different numbers of UAVs and prove its ability to safely explore the environment and reconstruct the map even with the hardware limitations of consumer-grade UAVs.

Abstract--This work addresses the collaborative multi-robot autonomous online exploration problem, particularly focusing on distributed exploration planning for dynamically balanced exploration area partition and task allocation among a team of mobile robots operating in obstacle-dense non-convex environments. We present a novel topological map structure that simultaneously characterizes both spatial connectivity and global exploration completeness of the environment. The topological map is updated incrementally to utilize known spatial information for updating reachable spaces, while exploration targets are planned in a receding horizon fashion under global coverage guidance. A distributed weighted topological graph V oronoi algorithm is introduced implementing balanced graph space partitions of the fused topological maps. Theoretical guarantees are provided for distributed consensus convergence and equitable graph space partitions with constant bounds. A local planner optimizes the visitation sequence of exploration targets within the balanced partitioned graph space to minimize travel distance, while generating safe, smooth, and dynamically feasible motion trajectories. Comprehensive benchmarking against state-of-the-art methods demonstrates significant improvements in exploration efficiency, completeness, and workload balance across the robot team. Autonomous exploration via multi-robot systems, which leverages robotic systems to map unknown environments cooperatively, is a critical capability for applications such as inspection, search-and-rescue, and disaster response [1], [2], [3]. Multi-robot systems offer substantial advantages, including accelerated exploration and enhanced fault tolerance. Despite their potential, developing robust and efficient multi-robot exploration systems remains challenging due to suboptimal task allocation, and inefficient coordination strategies. Previous collaborative exploration approaches often rely on centralized controllers [4], [5], which are impractical in real-world scenarios with unreliable or range-limited connectivity. Decentralized coordination methods have been proposed to mitigate these issues [6], [7], [8] yet many multi-robot exploration approaches still suffer from critical inefficiencies.

Autonomous robot exploration requires a robot to efficiently explore and map unknown environments. Compared to conventional methods that can only optimize paths based on the current robot belief, learning-based methods show the potential to achieve improved performance by drawing on past experiences to reason about unknown areas. In this paper, we propose DARE, a novel generative approach that leverages diffusion models trained on expert demonstrations, which can explicitly generate an exploration path through one-time inference. We build DARE upon an attention-based encoder and a diffusion policy model, and introduce ground truth optimal demonstrations for training to learn better patterns for exploration. The trained planner can reason about the partial belief to recognize the potential structure in unknown areas and consider these areas during path planning. Our experiments demonstrate that DARE achieves on-par performance with both conventional and learning-based state-of-the-art exploration planners, as well as good generalizability in both simulations and real-life scenarios.

In this paper, we introduce HDPlanner, a deep reinforcement learning (DRL) based framework designed to tackle two core and challenging tasks for mobile robots: autonomous exploration and navigation, where the robot must optimize its trajectory adaptively to achieve the task objective through continuous interactions in unknown environments. Specifically, HDPlanner relies on novel hierarchical attention networks to empower the robot to reason about its belief across multiple spatial scales and sequence collaborative decisions, where our networks decompose long-term objectives into short-term informative task assignments and informative path plannings. We further propose a contrastive learning-based joint optimization to enhance the robustness of HDPlanner. We empirically demonstrate that HDPlanner significantly outperforms state-of-the-art conventional and learning-based baselines on an extensive set of simulations, including hundreds of test maps and large-scale, complex Gazebo environments. Notably, HDPlanner achieves real-time planning with travel distances reduced by up to 35.7% compared to exploration benchmarks and by up to 16.5% than navigation benchmarks. Furthermore, we validate our approach on hardware, where it generates high-quality, adaptive trajectories in both indoor and outdoor environments, highlighting its real-world applicability without additional training.

This paper introduces FALCON, a novel Fast Autonomous expLoration framework using COverage path guidaNce, which aims at setting a new performance benchmark in the field of autonomous aerial exploration. Despite recent advancements in the domain, existing exploration planners often suffer from inefficiencies such as frequent revisitations of previously explored regions. FALCON effectively harnesses the full potential of online generated coverage paths in enhancing exploration efficiency. The framework begins with an incremental connectivity-aware space decomposition and connectivity graph construction, which facilitate efficient coverage path planning. Subsequently, a hierarchical planner generates a coverage path spanning the entire unexplored space, serving as a global guidance. Then, a local planner optimizes the frontier visitation order, minimizing traversal time while consciously incorporating the intention of the global guidance. Finally, minimum-time smooth and safe trajectories are produced to visit the frontier viewpoints. For fair and comprehensive benchmark experiments, we introduce a lightweight exploration planner evaluation environment that allows for comparing exploration planners across a variety of testing scenarios using an identical quadrotor simulator. Additionally, a VECO criteria is proposed for an in-depth analysis of FALCON's significant performance in comparison with the state-of-the-art exploration planners. Extensive ablation studies demonstrate the effectiveness of each component in the proposed framework. Real-world experiments conducted fully onboard further validate FALCON's practical capability in complex and challenging environments. The source code of both the exploration planner FALCON and the exploration planner evaluation environment will be released to benefit the community.

On construction sites, progress must be monitored continuously to ensure that the current state corresponds to the planned state in order to increase efficiency, safety and detect construction defects at an early stage. Autonomous mobile robots can document the state of construction with high data quality and consistency. However, finding a path that fully covers the construction site is a challenging task as it can be large, slowly changing over time, and contain dynamic objects. Existing approaches are either exploration approaches that require a long time to explore the entire building, object scanning approaches that are not suitable for large and complex buildings, or planning approaches that only consider 2D coverage. In this paper, we present a novel approach for planning an efficient 3D path for progress monitoring on large construction sites with multiple levels. By making use of an existing 3D model we ensure that all surfaces of the building are covered by the sensor payload such as a 360-degree camera or a lidar. This enables the consistent and reliable monitoring of construction site progress with an autonomous ground robot. We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed planner on an artificial and a real building model, showing that much shorter paths and better coverage are achieved than with a traditional exploration planner.