MULAN-WC: Multi-Robot Localization Uncertainty-aware Active NeRF with Wireless Coordination

TL;DR

MULAN-WC introduces a multi-robot 3D reconstruction framework that uses wireless signals for coordination, estimates pose uncertainty, and actively selects views to improve reconstruction quality and speed.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel wireless signal-based multi-robot localization and active view selection method integrated with NeRF for improved 3D reconstruction.

Findings

Effective wireless pose estimation with uncertainty quantification.

Enhanced 3D reconstruction quality close to ground truth poses.

Active view selection improves convergence speed and rendering quality.

Abstract

This paper presents MULAN-WC, a novel multi-robot 3D reconstruction framework that leverages wireless signal-based coordination between robots and Neural Radiance Fields (NeRF). Our approach addresses key challenges in multi-robot 3D reconstruction, including inter-robot pose estimation, localization uncertainty quantification, and active best-next-view selection. We introduce a method for using wireless Angle-of-Arrival (AoA) and ranging measurements to estimate relative poses between robots, as well as quantifying and incorporating the uncertainty embedded in the wireless localization of these pose estimates into the NeRF training loss to mitigate the impact of inaccurate camera poses. Furthermore, we propose an active view selection approach that accounts for robot pose uncertainty when determining the next-best views to improve the 3D reconstruction, enabling faster convergence through intelligent view selection. Extensive experiments on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our framework in theory and in practice. Leveraging wireless coordination and localization uncertainty-aware training, MULAN-WC can achieve high-quality 3d reconstruction which is close to applying the ground truth camera poses. Furthermore, the quantification of the information gain from a novel view enables consistent rendering quality improvement with incrementally captured images by commending the robot the novel view position. Our hardware experiments showcase the practicality of deploying MULAN-WC to real robotic systems.