EAAE: Energy-Aware Autonomous Exploration for UAVs in Unknown 3D Environments

TL;DR

This paper introduces EAAE, a modular framework for energy-aware autonomous exploration of UAVs in unknown 3D environments, optimizing energy use while maintaining exploration efficiency.

Contribution

EAAE explicitly incorporates energy considerations into frontier-based exploration, clustering frontiers, planning energy-efficient trajectories, and predicting energy consumption for UAVs.

Findings

EAAE reduces total energy consumption compared to baselines.

EAAE maintains exploration time and map quality.

EAAE is effective across complex simulated environments.

Abstract

Battery-powered multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can rapidly map unknown environments, but mission performance is often limited by energy rather than geometry alone. Standard exploration policies that optimise for coverage or time can therefore waste energy through manoeuvre-heavy trajectories. In this paper, we address energy-aware autonomous 3D exploration for multirotor UAVs in initially unknown environments. We propose Energy-Aware Autonomous Exploration (EAAE), a modular frontier-based framework that makes energy an explicit decision variable during frontier selection. EAAE clusters frontiers into view-consistent regions, plans dynamically feasible candidate trajectories to the most informative clusters, and predicts their execution energy using an offline power estimation loop. The next target is then selected by minimising predicted trajectory energy while preserving exploration progress through a dual-layer planning architecture for safe execution. We evaluate EAAE in a full exploration pipeline with a rotor-speed-based power model across simulated 3D environments of increasing complexity. Compared to representative distance-based and information gain-based frontier baselines, EAAE consistently reduces total energy consumption while maintaining competitive exploration time and comparable map quality, providing a practical drop-in energy-aware layer for frontier exploration.