Online Next-Best-View Planner for 3D-Exploration and Inspection with a Mobile Manipulator Robot

Robotic systems performing end-user oriented autonomous exploration can be deployed in different scenarios which not only require mapping but also simultaneous inspection of regions of interest for the end-user. In this work, we propose a novel Next-Best-View (NBV) planner which can perform full exploration and user-oriented exploration with inspection of the regions of interest using a mobile manipulator robot. We address the exploration-inspection problem as an instance of Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) and propose a weighted-sum-based information gain function for computing NBVs for the RGB-D camera mounted on the arm. For both types of exploration tasks, we compare our approach with an existing state-of-the-art exploration method as the baseline and demonstrate our improvements in terms of total volume mapped and lower computational requirements. The real experiments with a mobile manipulator robot demonstrate the practicability and effectiveness of our approach outdoors.