Autonomous exploration is a fundamental challenge for various applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). To enhance exploration efficiency in large-scale unknown environments, we propose a Fast Autonomous Exploration Framework (FAEM) designed to enable efficient autonomous exploration and real-time mapping by UAV quadrotors in unknown environments. By employing a hierarchical exploration strategy that integrates geometry-constrained, occlusion-free ellipsoidal viewpoint generation with a global-guided kinodynamic topological path searching method, the framework identifies a global path that accesses high-gain viewpoints and generates a corresponding highly maneuverable, energy-efficient flight trajectory. This integrated approach within the hierarchical framework achieves an effective balance between exploration efficiency and computational cost. Furthermore, to ensure trajectory continuity and stability during real-world execution, we propose an adaptive dynamic replanning strategy incorporating dynamic starting point selection and real-time replanning. Experimental results demonstrate FAEM’s superior performance compared to typical and state-of-the-art methods in existence. The proposed method was successfully validated on an autonomous quadrotor platform equipped with LiDAR navigation. The UAV achieves coverage of 8957–13,042 m³ and increases exploration speed by 23.4% compared to the state-of-the-art FUEL method, demonstrating its effectiveness in large-scale, complex real-world environments.

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) remains challenging in dynamic environments. Recent approaches combining deep learning with algorithms for dynamic scenes comprise two types: faster, less accurate object detection-based methods and highly accurate, computationally costly instance segmentation-based methods. In addition, maps lacking semantic information hinder robots from understanding their environment and performing complex tasks. This paper presents a lightweight visual-inertial SLAM system. The system is based on the classic ORB-SLAM3 framework, which starts a new thread for object detection and tightly couples the semantic information of object detection with geometric information to remove feature points from dynamic objects. In addition, Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) data are employed to assist in feature point extraction, thereby compensating for visual pose tracking loss. Finally, a dense octree-based semantic map is constructed by fusing semantic information and visualized using ROS. LVID-SLAM demonstrates excellent pose accuracy and robustness in highly dynamic scenes on the public TUM dataset, with an average ATE reduction of more than 80% compared to ORB-SLAM3. The experimental results demonstrate that LVID-SLAM outperforms other methods in dynamic conditions, offering both real-time capability and robustness.