Fully Autonomous UAV Exploration in Confined and Connectionless Environments
Abstract
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can provide automated approaches to remote data collection, inspection, and exploration. When doing so, these tasks are accompanied by commercial gains and safety benefits. While UAVs can automate these tasks in some environments today, their size, resource requirements, and communication dependencies prevent them from exploring many other types of environments. These barriers are especially prevalent in areas that deny wireless communication and are too small for larger-bodied UAVs. In this work we present a novel exploration planner capable of overcoming these barriers and operating in otherwise inaccessible environments. To achieve this, we present a new approach to frontier detection and mapping which enables exploration and scales to nano sized UAVs. We prove the viability of this solution through real-world experimentation at WING research labs. This exploration software accommodates the extreme resource constraints of the small UAVs required to fly in confined spaces. The presented strategy is truly autonomous with no dependency on communication with external systems and no prior knowledge of the exploration space. To the best of our knowledge, the presented prototype can explore the smallest spaces that have yet to be reached by connectionless and autonomous UAVS. This claim is supported by the demonstration of real-world testing as our prototype achieved full exploration of several challenging environments.