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Contribution Details

Type Journal Article
Scope Discipline-based scholarship
Title Active autonomous aerial exploration for ground robot path planning
Organization Unit
Authors
  • Jeffrey Delmerico
  • Elias Müggler
  • Julia Nitsch
  • Davide Scaramuzza
Item Subtype Original Work
Refereed Yes
Status Published in final form
Language
  • English
Journal Title IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters
Publisher Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers
Geographical Reach international
ISSN 2377-3766
Volume 2
Number 2
Page Range 664 - 671
Date 2017
Abstract Text We address the problem of planning a path for a ground robot through unknown terrain, using observations from a flying robot. In search and rescue missions, which are our target scenarios, the time from arrival at the disaster site to the delivery of aid is critically important. Previous works required exhaustive exploration before path planning, which is time-consuming but eventually leads to an optimal path for the ground robot. Instead, we propose active exploration of the environment, where the flying robot chooses regions to map in a way that optimizes the overall response time of the system, which is the combined time for the air and ground robots to execute their missions. In our approach, we estimate terrain classes throughout our terrain map, and we also add elevation information in areas where the active exploration algorithm has chosen to perform 3-D reconstruction. This terrain information is used to estimate feasible and efficient paths for the ground robot. By exploring the environment actively, we achieve superior response times compared to both exhaustive and greedy exploration strategies. We demonstrate the performance and capabilities of the proposed system in simulated and real-world outdoor experiments. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work to address ground robot path planning using active aerial exploration.
Free access at DOI
Official URL http://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/RAL16_Delmerico.pdf
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/lra.2017.2651163
Other Identification Number merlin-id:15098
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