Autonomous exploration is crucial and highly challenging for various intelligent operations of unmanned aerial vehicles. However, low-efficiency problems caused by low-quality trajectory or back-and-forth maneuvers (BFMs) still exist. To improve the exploration efficiency in unknown environments, a fast autonomous exploration planner is proposed in this article. We first design a novel frontier exploration sequence generation method to significantly reduce BFM during the exploration by considering multilevel factors in an asymmetric traveling salesman problem. Then, according to the exploration sequence and the distribution of frontiers, an adaptive yaw planning method is proposed to cover more frontiers by yaw change during an exploration journey. In addition, to increase the fluency of flight, a dynamic replanning strategy is also adopted. The main technical contributions of the proposed approach are to provide a comprehensive global coverage path with less BFM and use adaptive yaw planning to generate more reasonable yaw trajectory. We present extensive comparison and real-world experiments to validate the effectiveness and correctness of our method. Experimental results show that the proposed approach has better performance compared to typical and state-of-the-art methods in these flat scenarios without lots of scattered obstacles.

Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (VSLAM) is a prerequisite for robots to accomplish fully autonomous movement and exploration in unknown environments. At present, many impressive VSLAM systems have emerged, but most of them rely on the static world assumption, which limits their application in real dynamic scenarios. To improve the robustness and efficiency of the system in dynamic environments, this paper proposes a dynamic RGBD SLAM based on a combination of geometric and semantic information (DGS-SLAM). First, a dynamic object detection module based on the multinomial residual model is proposed, which executes the motion segmentation of the scene by combining the motion residual information of adjacent frames and the potential motion information of the semantic segmentation module. Second, a camera pose tracking strategy using feature point classification results is designed to achieve robust system tracking. Finally, according to the results of dynamic segmentation and camera tracking, a semantic segmentation module based on a semantic frame selection strategy is designed for extracting potential moving targets in the scene. Extensive evaluation in public TUM and Bonn datasets demonstrates that DGS-SLAM has higher robustness and speed than state-of-the-art dynamic RGB-D SLAM systems in dynamic scenes.

Registration is a basic yet crucial task in point cloud processing. In correspondence-based point cloud registration, matching correspondences by point feature techniques may lead to an extremely high outlier (false correspondence) ratio. Current outlier removal methods still suffer from low efficiency, accuracy, and recall rate. We use an intuitive method to describe the 6-DOF (degree of freedom) curtailment process in point cloud registration and propose an outlier removal strategy based on the reliability of the correspondence graph. The method constructs the corresponding graph according to the given correspondences and designs the concept of the reliability degree of the graph node for optimal candidate selection and the reliability degree of the graph edge to obtain the global maximum consensus set. The presented method achieves fast and accurate outliers removal along with gradual aligning parameters estimation. Extensive experiments on simulations and challenging real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method can still perform effective point cloud registration even the correspondence outlier ratio is over 99%, and the efficiency is better than the state-of-the-art. Code is available at https://github.com/WPC-WHU/GROR .

Plane segmentation is a basic yet important process in light detection and ranging (LiDAR) point cloud processing. The traditional point cloud plane segmentation algorithm is typically affected by the number of point clouds and the noise data, which results in slow segmentation efficiency and poor segmentation effect. Hence, an efficient encoding voxel-based segmentation (EVBS) algorithm based on a fast adjacent voxel search is proposed in this study. First, a binary octree algorithm is proposed to construct the voxel as the segmentation object and code the voxel, which can compute voxel features quickly and accurately. Second, a voxel-based region growing algorithm is proposed to cluster the corresponding voxel to perform the initial point cloud segmentation, which can improve the rationality of seed selection. Finally, a refining point method is proposed to solve the problem of under-segmentation in unlabeled voxels by judging the relationship between the points and the segmented plane. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is better than the traditional algorithm in terms of computation time, extraction accuracy, and recall rate.

Taking depth into consideration has been proven to improve the performance of semantic segmentation through providing additional geometry information. Most existing works adopt a two-stream network, extracting features from color images and depth images separately using two branches of the same structure, which suffer from high memory and computation costs. We find that depth features acquired by simple downsampling can also play a complementary part in the semantic segmentation task, sometimes even better than the two-stream scheme with the same two branches. In this paper, a novel and efficient depth fusion transformer network for aerial image segmentation is proposed. The presented network utilizes patch merging to downsample depth input and a depth-aware self-attention (DSA) module is designed to mitigate the gap caused by difference between two branches and two modalities. Concretely, the DSA fuses depth features and color features by computing depth similarity and impact on self-attention map calculated by color feature. Extensive experiments on the ISPRS 2D semantic segmentation dataset validate the efficiency and effectiveness of our method. With nearly half the parameters of traditional two-stream scheme, our method acquires 83.82% mIoU on Vaihingen dataset outperforming other state-of-the-art methods and 87.43% mIoU on Potsdam dataset comparable to the state-of-the-art.