P2Explore: Efficient Exploration in Unknown Clustered Environment with Floor Plan Prediction
P2 Explore: Efficient Exploration in Unknown Cluttered Environment with Floor Plan Prediction


Kun Song1, Gaoming Chen1, Masayoshi Tomizuka2, Wei Zhan2, Zhenhua Xiong1, Mingyu Ding2

1Shanghai Jiao Tong University, 2University of California, Berkeley

Paper | Code

Abstract. Robot exploration aims at the reconstruction of unknown environments, and it is important to achieve it with shorter paths. Traditional methods focus on optimizing the visiting order of frontiers based on current observations, which may lead to local-minimal results. Recently, by predicting the structure of the unseen environment, the exploration efficiency can be further improved. However, in a cluttered environment, due to the randomness of obstacles, the ability to predict is weak. Moreover, this inaccuracy will lead to limited improvement in exploration. Therefore, we propose FPUNet which can be efficient in predicting the layout of noisy indoor environments. Then, we extract the segmentation of rooms and construct their topological connectivity based on the predicted map. The visiting order of these predicted rooms is optimized which can provide high-level guidance for exploration. The FPUNet is compared with other network architecture which demonstrates it is the SOTA method for this task. Extensive experiments in simulations show that our proposed method can benefit the exploration efficiency.


Overview of Proposed Method

In this work, we focus on the scenario of 2D exploration. To perform map prediction in cluttered environments:

  • Step 1: FPUNet is used to perform map prediction on local maps.
  • Step 2: Local maps are merged into a global predicted map.
  • Step 3: The predicted map is used to construct the segmentation of rooms and their connectivity.
  • Step 4: Visiting order of all rooms including the predicted rooms is optimized.
  • Step 5: Next target for exploration is selected based on this guidance.

Experiments

Example of Using Prediction in Exploration

Comparison Study of Map Prediction Accuracy

Comparison of Map Prediction Results
Methods Recall (%) Precision (%) F1 Score Params (M) MACs (G)
VAE [Shrestha et al., 2019] 41.5 60.7 0.493 27.7 6.01
ViT [Dosovitskiy et al., 2020] 63.4 52.2 0.576 80.7 3.51
UNet [Ronneberger et al., 2015] 80.4 70.1 0.749 7.76 3.43
UNet++ [Zhou et al., 2018] 78.5 76.0 0.772 11.8 12.5
FPUNet 76.1 84.6 0.801 20.7 14.6

Qualitative Analysis of Map Prediction Results

Note that in VAE, we follow the implementation in [Shrestha et al., 2019] which only contains predicted information of two types: free and obstacles.

Comparison Study of Exploration Efficiency

Comparison and ablation studies of exploration efficiency. Evaluation metric: path length (m).
Method Area Size
Small
(<200 m²)
Middle
(200-600 m²)
Large
(>600 m²)
NBV 87.20 (42.54) 379.55 (110.12) 948.34 (486.97)
TSP 71.77 (38.85) 261.65 (94.18) 652.31 (402.99)
Prediction+NBV 62.50 (27.76) 255.08 (81.76) 654.76 (339.06)
P² Explore 58.71 (29.16) 249.51 (81.71) 620.19 (287.25)

Qualitative Comparison of Exploration Efficiency

NBV

NBV

TSP

TSP

p2explore

P2 Explore

Real-world Experiments