Autonomous Exploration, Reconstruction, and Surveillance of 3D Environments Aided by Deep Learning

We propose a greedy and supervised learning approach for visibility-based exploration, reconstruction and surveillance. Using a level set representation, we train a convolutional neural network to determine vantage points that maximize visibility. We show that this method drastically reduces the on-line computational cost and determines a small set of vantage points that solve the problem. This enables us to efficiently produce highly-resolved and topologically accurate maps of complex 3D environments. Unlike traditional next-best-view and frontier-based strategies, the proposed method accounts for geometric priors while evaluating potential vantage points. While existing deep learning approaches focus on obstacle avoidance and local navigation, our method aims at finding near-optimal solutions to the more global exploration problem. We present realistic simulations on 2D and 3D urban environments.