A Multirobot System for 3-D Surface Reconstruction With Centralized and Distributed Architectures

In this article, we propose an original solution to the problem of surface reconstruction of large-scale unknown environments, with multiple cooperative robots. As they progress through the 3-D environment, the robots rely on volumetric maps obtained via a TSDF representation to extract discrete inc...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:IEEE transactions on robotics 2023-08, Vol.39 (4), p.2623-2638
Main Authors: Hardouin, Guillaume, Moras, Julien, Morbidi, Fabio, Marzat, Julien, Mouaddib, El Mustapha
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Computer Science
Multiagent systems
Multiple robots
Multirobot system
next-best-view (NBV) planning
Planning
Reconstruction
Representations
Robot sensing systems
Robotics
Robots
sampling-based motion planning
Sea surface
Surface reconstruction
Surface treatment
Systems and Control
three-dimensional (3-D) reconstruction
Three-dimensional displays
Traveling salesman problem
truncated signed distance function (TSDF)
Unknown environments
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Summary:In this article, we propose an original solution to the problem of surface reconstruction of large-scale unknown environments, with multiple cooperative robots. As they progress through the 3-D environment, the robots rely on volumetric maps obtained via a TSDF representation to extract discrete incomplete surface elements (ISEs), and a list of candidate viewpoints is generated to cover them. A next-best-view planning approach, which approximately solves a traveling salesman problem (TSP) via greedy allocation, is then used to iteratively assign these viewpoints to the robots. Two multiagent architectures, a centralized one (TSP-Greedy Allocation or TSGA) and a distributed one (dist-TSGA), in which the robots locally compute their maps and share them, are developed and compared. Extensive numerical and real-world experiments with multiple aerial and ground robots in challenging 3-D environments show the flexibility and effectiveness of our surface representation of a volumetric map. The experiments also shed light on the nexus between reconstruction accuracy and surface completeness, and between total distance traveled and execution time.
ISSN:1552-3098
1941-0468
DOI:10.1109/TRO.2023.3258641