View Planning for Objects Modeling using UAVs

Abstract: View planning is an important part of achieving full robotic autonomy. The ability to incorporate the view of a robot as well as the ability of evaluating and choosing the best view are highly desired abilities for a wide variety of robotics applications. In this work we present a new iterative optimization scheme and evaluational method in order to choose the Next Best View in the framework of object modeling. As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) become more and more common we take advantage of the additional degrees of freedom a UAV offers. We show, in simulation, that the proposed method is able to pick out views that are highly relevant in order to model the observed object in question. It is shown that with iterative optimization the resulting view is improved. Additional experiments where the method is deployed onto a real UAV show the real-world applicability of the method.