Special Session 34: 

Autonomous visual exploration of unknown domains aided by machine learning

Richard Tsai
The University of Texas at Austin
USA
Co-Author(s):    Louis Long Ly
Abstract:
In this talk, we consider the problem of exploring and reconstructing an a priori unknown environment based on range (visual) data from a single, moving observer. The observer is to roam around a piece of unknown domain and reconstruct it, using as few observations of the environment as possible. We present a greedy and iterative algorithm for designing the observation locations based on observations made in the previous iteration. The choice of each new observation location is aided by a convolution neural network, which is trained with a suitable database as a prior to the unknown environment to be explored. We will demonstrate the performance of the new algorithm for exploring realistic 2D and 3D settings.