FrontierNet: Learning Visual Cues to Explore

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Sun, Boyang, Chen, Hanzhi, Leutenegger, Stefan, Cadena, Cesar, Pollefeys, Marc, Blum, Hermann
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Sun, Boyang
Chen, Hanzhi
Leutenegger, Stefan
Cadena, Cesar
Pollefeys, Marc
Blum, Hermann
author_facet Sun, Boyang
Chen, Hanzhi
Leutenegger, Stefan
Cadena, Cesar
Pollefeys, Marc
Blum, Hermann
contents Exploration of unknown environments is crucial for autonomous robots; it allows them to actively reason and decide on what new data to acquire for different tasks, such as mapping, object discovery, and environmental assessment. Existing solutions, such as frontier-based exploration approaches, rely heavily on 3D map operations, which are limited by map quality and, more critically, often overlook valuable context from visual cues. This work aims at leveraging 2D visual cues for efficient autonomous exploration, addressing the limitations of extracting goal poses from a 3D map. We propose a visual-only frontier-based exploration system, with FrontierNet as its core component. FrontierNet is a learning-based model that (i) proposes frontiers, and (ii) predicts their information gain, from posed RGB images enhanced by monocular depth priors. Our approach provides an alternative to existing 3D-dependent goal-extraction approaches, achieving a 15\% improvement in early-stage exploration efficiency, as validated through extensive simulations and real-world experiments. The project is available at https://github.com/cvg/FrontierNet.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_04597
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle FrontierNet: Learning Visual Cues to Explore
Sun, Boyang
Chen, Hanzhi
Leutenegger, Stefan
Cadena, Cesar
Pollefeys, Marc
Blum, Hermann
Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Exploration of unknown environments is crucial for autonomous robots; it allows them to actively reason and decide on what new data to acquire for different tasks, such as mapping, object discovery, and environmental assessment. Existing solutions, such as frontier-based exploration approaches, rely heavily on 3D map operations, which are limited by map quality and, more critically, often overlook valuable context from visual cues. This work aims at leveraging 2D visual cues for efficient autonomous exploration, addressing the limitations of extracting goal poses from a 3D map. We propose a visual-only frontier-based exploration system, with FrontierNet as its core component. FrontierNet is a learning-based model that (i) proposes frontiers, and (ii) predicts their information gain, from posed RGB images enhanced by monocular depth priors. Our approach provides an alternative to existing 3D-dependent goal-extraction approaches, achieving a 15\% improvement in early-stage exploration efficiency, as validated through extensive simulations and real-world experiments. The project is available at https://github.com/cvg/FrontierNet.
title FrontierNet: Learning Visual Cues to Explore
topic Robotics
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.04597