メモリ限界を超えて:大規模3D自律探査のための階層的時空間マップ表現
Beyond Memory Limits: A Hierarchical Spatio-Temporal Map Representation for Large-Scale 3D Autonomous Exploration
機体中心の局所地図に密な幾何情報を限定しつつ、軽量な観測記録と未解決フロンティアをタスクとして保持する階層的時空間フレームワークFLAVORを提案し、大規模環境でもメモリ増加を抑えたUAV探査を実現した。
著者: Yizhe Zhang, Jianping Li, Yilun Gao, Liangliang Yin, Pengfei Wan, Bisheng Yang
分類: cs.RO
原文アブストラクト
Autonomous UAV exploration is increasingly used for large-scale surveying and inspection in inaccessible or disaster-affected environments, where onboard memory and computational resources are often severely constrained. Most existing UAV exploration systems maintain globally queryable geometric map representations for motion planning and exploration decision-making, causing memory consumption and spatial-query costs to increase with the explored area. Robot-centric local mapping bounds dense-map memory and computation but discards global task context needed for long-horizon exploration.We present FLAVOR, a hierarchical spatio-temporal framework that confines dense metric geometry to a robot-centric local map while retaining compact global observation and task context. At the observation level, lightweight LiDAR-keyframe visibility records preserve ray-wise evidence for frontier reasoning. At the task level, unresolved frontiers beyond the local-map extent are retained as compact pending tasks associated with odometry anchors. A sparse topological graph connects these anchors through retained routes for future revisits.Upon returning to a task region, FLAVOR reconstructs the frontier and exploration viewpoint from observations, while the topological route is instantiated and validated against the current local map before execution. Dense-map capacity remains fixed as exploration expands, with exploration-dependent memory growth confined to compact observation and task context.FLAVOR achieves 31.98--41.88% shorter exploration time and a 94--99% smaller map memory footprint than the best baseline that completes all three simulated scenes. In real-world deployments, it reduces this footprint by 92.67% in the forest and 62.42% at the construction site relative to an explicit point-cloud ikd-tree while preserving long-term task continuity under constrained onboard resources.