Return-to-Home Feasible Micro-Aerial Vehicle Exploration for 3D Gaussian Splatting Reconstruction

Abstract:Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) enable rapid indoor 3D reconstruction for inspection and time-critical situational awareness, but must operate under strict flight-time budgets and safety constraints that require explicit return-to-home (RTH) feasibility with a conservative margin. We present a topology-first active reconstruction framework that decouples high-fidelity rendering from navigation. A dense 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) map is optimized as the reconstruction target, while a lightweight Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF)/occupancy scaffold supports conservative collision checking and online construction of a sparse 3D Voronoi skeleton roadmap. Since directly extracting roadmaps from TSDF geometry can be unstable under noisy and incomplete online fusion, we validate nodes and edges using carved free-space consistency and dense visibility checks, which suppress behind-wall phantom structure and stabilize planning. Viewpoints are selected on the roadmap using a flight-time-budget-aware objective and a lightweight receding-horizon lookahead to improve non-myopic exploration behavior. We evaluate on photorealistic indoor simulation benchmarks (ReplicaCAD, Gibson, and HM3D), reporting reconstruction coverage/error, RTH success, and computational cost. Results demonstrate improved or competitive performance relative to recent GS-based baselines under identical flight-time budgets.

Robotics (cs.RO)

arXiv:2610.04013 [cs.RO]

(or arXiv:2610.04013v1 [cs.RO] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.04013 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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