TARE: A Hierarchical Framework for Efficiently Exploring Complex 3D Environments

July 2021

TARE: A Hierarchical Framework for Efficiently Exploring Complex 3D Environments

Authors:

Chao Cao, Hongbiao Zhu, Howie Choset, and Ji Zhang

Abstract:

We present a method for autonomous exploration in complex three-dimensional (3D) environments. Our method demonstrates exploration faster than the current state-of-the-art using a hierarchical framework-one level maintains data densely and computes a detailed path within a local planning horizon, while another level maintains data sparsely and computes a coarse path at the global scale. Such a framework shares the insight that detailed processing is most effective close to the robot, and gains computational speed by trading-off details far away from the robot. The method optimizes an overall exploration path with respect to the length of the path and produces a kinodynamically feasible local path. In experiments, our systems autonomously explore indoor and outdoor environments at a high degree of complexity, with ground and aerial robots. The method produces 80% more exploration efficiency, defined as the average explored volume per second through a run, and consumes less than 50% of computation compared to the state-of-the-art.
@conference{Cao-2021-127448,
author = {Chao Cao And Hongbiao Zhu And Howie Choset And Ji Zhang},
title = {TARE: A Hierarchical Framework for Efficiently Exploring Complex 3D Environments},
booktitle = {Proceedings of Robotics: Science and Systems (RSS '21)},
year = {2021},
month = {July},
}
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