P8. Exploration with Leightweight UAVs
Project coordinator/staff: C. Stachniss, E. Palazzolo
Summary:
The focus of the project is the development of effective exploration strategies for flying platforms. Useful models
of the environment or the object to be explored are built on the basis of trajectories calculated on-line on
the platform. The platform has to decide where to take the next image, including the viewing direction.
We are using information-theory principles to minimize the uncertainty of the knowledge of the world when
calculating the next observation pose. The expected information gain plays a major role in our method. The central challenge
is to find an appropiate approximation for the information gain, incalculable in its pure form. We think that
background knowledge makes possible to effectively estimate the expected information we will get from new observations.