ECHO: An Efficient Heuristic Viewpoint Determination Method on Frontier-Based Autonomous Exploration for Quadrotors

Abstract

As a popular drone application, autonomous exploration suffers from low efficiency. To address the issue of repeated and unnecessary exploration, especially in a large-scale and cluttered environment, this paper proposes an efficient heuristic viewpoint determination method on frontier-based autonomous exploration, which includes viewpoint generation, evaluation, and refinement. A Gaussian sampler is employed to randomly generate higher-quality initial viewpoints; meanwhile, a fresh heuristic evaluation function is designed to select the next viewpoint; besides, a refinement strategy is presented to improve the viewpoint. Extensive simulations and real-world tests indicate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art frontier-based method by 15%-25% in almost all scenarios. More details of the experiments can be found at <uri xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">https://youtu.be/Z9dYpEOGXcI</uri> .