A 3D Frontier-Based Exploration Tool for MAVs

Abstract

This paper presents a 3D frontier-based exploration tool named 3D-FBET. Our tool runs onboard the MAV equipped with a 3D sensor. The 3D map of the environment explored is constructed incrementally from two consecutive point clouds obtained. Considering the computation and memory limitations of MAVs, the OctoMap is utilized to represent 3D models. A novel approach is designed to extract the 3D frontiers from the OctoMap. Different from existing extraction method, only state-changed space in the 3D map is processed in each iteration. We implement our approach on top of the well-known robot operating system (ROS) and demonstrate the effectiveness of our tool in real scenarios.