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