Surface Edge Explorer (ICRA 2018)
Share
Rowan Border has had his paper on next best view (NBV) selection accepted to ICRA 2018. Come talk to us if you're at ICRA in Brisbane, Australia in May, or read it on arXiv right now.
- Publication
- Conference
- Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)
- Pages
- 1–8
- Location
- Brisbane, Australia
- Date
Abstract
Surveying 3D scenes is a common task in robotics. Systems can do so autonomously by iteratively obtaining measurements. This process of planning observations to improve the model of a scene is called Next Best View (NBV) planning.
NBV planning approaches often use either volumetric (e.g., voxel grids) or surface (e.g., triangulated meshes) representations. Volumetric approaches generalise well between scenes as they do not depend on surface geometry but do not scale to high-resolution models of large scenes. Surface representations can obtain high-resolution models at any scale but often require tuning of unintuitive parameters or multiple survey stages.
This paper presents a scene-model-free NBV planning approach with a density representation. The Surface Edge Explorer (SEE) uses the density of current measurements to detect and explore observed surface boundaries. This approach is shown experimentally to provide better surface coverage in lower computation time than the evaluated state-of-the-art volumetric approaches while moving equivalent distances.