Autonomous exploration is a widely studied fundamental application in the field of quadrotors, which requires them to automatically explore unknown space to obtain complete information about the environment. The frontier-based method, which is one of the representative works on autonomous exploration, drives autonomous determination by the definition of frontier information, so that complete information about the environment is available to the quadrotor. However, existing frontier-based methods are able to accomplish the task but still suffer from inefficient exploration. How to improve the efficiency of autonomous exploration is the focus of current research. Typical problems include slow frontier generation, which affects real-time viewpoint determination, and insufficient determination methods that affect the quality of viewpoints. Therefore, to overcome these problems, this paper proposes a two-level viewpoint determination method for frontier-based autonomous exploration. Firstly, a sampling-based frontier detection method is presented for faster frontier generation, which improves the immediacy of environmental representation compared to traditional traversal-based methods. Secondly, we consider the access to environmental information during flight for the first time and design an innovative heuristic evaluation function to decide on a high-quality viewpoint as the next local navigation target in each exploration iteration. We conducted extensive benchmark and real-world tests to validate our method. The results confirm that our method optimizes the frontier search time by 85%, the exploration time by around 20-30%, and the exploration path by 25-35%.
翻译:自主勘探是钻探器领域广泛研究的基本应用,要求它们自动探索未知空间,以获得关于环境的完整信息。基于边界的方法是自主勘探的代表性工作之一,它推动根据边界信息的定义自行确定环境信息,以便向钻探器提供关于环境的完整信息。然而,现有的基于边界的方法能够完成任务,但仍受到低效率的探索的影响。如何提高自主勘探的效率是当前研究的重点。典型的问题包括:缓慢的边界生成,它影响到实时观点的确定,以及影响观点质量的确定方法不足。因此,为了克服这些问题,本文件提出了基于边界的自主勘探的两级观点确定方法。首先,基于取样的边界检测方法为更快的边界生成提供,这提高了环境代表的中间性,而传统的基于地形的勘探方法则仍然缺乏效率。第二,我们首次考虑在飞行期间如何获取环境信息的问题,并设计了一种创新的高度评价功能,以决定一种高质量的观点,作为每个勘探过程的下一个当地导航目标。因此,本文件提出了一种基于边界自主勘探的自主探索方法的两级确定观点的确定方法。首先,以抽样为基础的边界探测方法,通过20 % 检验了我们的实际时间检验方法,然后进行实际的检索。