FSMP: A Frontier-Sampling-Mixed Planner for Fast Autonomous Exploration of Complex and Large 3-D Environments

In this article, we propose a systematic framework for fast exploration of complex and large 3-D environments using micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). The key insight is the organic integration of the frontier- and sampling-based strategies that can achieve rapid global exploration of the environment. Specifically, a field-of-view (FOV)-based frontier detector with the guarantee of completeness and soundness is devised for identifying 3-D map frontiers. Different from random sampling-based methods, the deterministic sampling technique is employed to build and maintain an incremental road map based on the recorded sensor FOVs and newly detected frontiers. With the resulting road map, we propose a two-stage path planner. First, it quickly computes the global optimal exploration path on the road map using the lazy evaluation strategy. Then, the best exploration path is smoothed to further improve the exploration efficiency. We validate the proposed method both in simulation and real-world experiments. The comparative results demonstrate the promising performance of our planner in terms of exploration efficiency, computational time, and explored volume.