Return-to-Home Feasible Micro-Aerial Vehicle Exploration for 3D Gaussian Splatting Reconstruction

Summary

Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) enable rapid indoor 3D reconstruction for inspection and time-critical situational awareness, but must operate under strict flight-time budgets and safety constraints that require explicit return-to-home (RTH) feasibility with a conservative margin.

Abstract Summary

Key Points

• Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) enable rapid indoor 3D reconstruction for inspection and time-critical situational awareness, but must operate under strict flight-time budgets and safety constraints that require explicit return-to-home (RTH) feasibility with a conservative margin.
• We present a topology-first active reconstruction framework that decouples high-fidelity rendering from navigation.
• A dense 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) map is optimized as the reconstruction target, while a lightweight Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF)/occupancy scaffold supports conservative collision checking and online construction of a sparse 3D Voronoi skeleton roadmap.
• Since directly extracting roadmaps from TSDF geometry can be unstable under noisy and incomplete online fusion, we validate nodes and edges using carved free-space consistency and dense visibility checks, which suppress behind-wall phantom structure and stabilize planning.
• Viewpoints are selected on the roadmap using a flight-time-budget-aware objective and a lightweight receding-horizon lookahead to improve non-myopic exploration behavior.

Methodology

We address edge-assisted budgeted autonomous exploration for high-fidelity indoor reconstruction using an RGB-D equipped micro aerial vehicle. A fundamental challenge in active radiance-field mapping is that representations optimized for photorealistic rendering (e.g., 3DGS) lack the explicit, conservative free-space semantics required for safe navigation. To resolve this, our framework (Fig.

Experiments and Results

To validate the proposed exploration framework, we evaluate our MAV-based active reconstruction system in photorealistic indoor simulation to quantify reconstruction quality, safety (return-to-home feasibility), and computational cost. All experiments are conducted in the Habitat simulator, which provides photorealistic indoor environments, synchronized RGB-D observations, and a simulation clock.

Sources and Demonstrations

Figures are reproduced from Krisshnakumar et al. See the full paper for experimental details and the project page, when the paper links one, for demonstrations and videos.