Perception-aware Exploration for Consumer-grade UAVs

TL;DR

This paper adapts autonomous multi-UAV exploration techniques for consumer-grade drones, proposing a new pipeline and communication scheme that enable safe environment mapping despite hardware constraints.

Contribution

It introduces a perception-aware exploration pipeline and a semi-distributed communication scheme tailored for consumer UAVs like DJI Mini 3 Pro.

Findings

Successful simulation of multi-UAV exploration with consumer drones

Effective environment reconstruction despite hardware limitations

Safe exploration demonstrated in simulated environments

Abstract

In our work, we extend the current state-of-the-art approach for autonomous multi-UAV exploration to consumer-level UAVs, such as the DJI Mini 3 Pro. We propose a pipeline that selects viewpoint pairs from which the depth can be estimated and plans the trajectory that satisfies motion constraints necessary for odometry estimation. For the multi-UAV exploration, we propose a semi-distributed communication scheme that distributes the workload in a balanced manner. We evaluate our model performance in simulation for different numbers of UAVs and prove its ability to safely explore the environment and reconstruct the map even with the hardware limitations of consumer-grade UAVs.