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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Shi, Moji, de Silva, Rajitha, Yu, Hang, Polvara, Riccardo, Popović, Marija
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2026
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.15605
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  • Autonomous exploration in unknown environments typically relies on onboard state estimation for localisation and mapping. Existing exploration methods primarily maximise coverage efficiency, but often overlook that visual-inertial odometry (VIO) performance strongly depends on the availability of robust visual features. As a result, exploration policies can drive a robot into feature-sparse regions where tracking degrades, leading to odometry drift, corrupted maps, and mission failure. We propose a hierarchical perception-aware exploration framework for a stereo-equipped unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that explicitly couples exploration progress with feature observability. Our approach (i) associates each candidate frontier with an expected feature quality using a global feature map, and prioritises visually informative subgoals, and (ii) optimises a continuous yaw trajectory along the planned motion to maintain stable feature tracks. We evaluate our method in simulation across environments with varying texture levels and in real-world indoor experiments with largely textureless walls. Compared to baselines that ignore feature quality and/or do not optimise continuous yaw, our method maintains more reliable feature tracking, reduces odometry drift, and achieves on average 30\% higher coverage before the odometry error exceeds specified thresholds.