Autonomous exploration of indoor environments with a micro-aerial vehicle

The paper presents a system designed for micro-aerial-vehicles capable of autonomously explore an indoor environment, detect objects in the environment and build a map of the environment structure with reference to objects locations within the map. The found objects are saved in an internal database containing all previously recognized objects. The system allows fast exploration time and it is characterized by lightweight computation algorithms for the localization, map building and navigation components. The environment map is built as a set of 2D feature map layers where each layer corresponds to an environment floor. For each framework component a simulated testing scenario is presented to evaluate the capabilities of the designed algorithms. The introduced system is efficient from the computational cost point of view and allows fast exploration time that is critical for battery powered systems.