GPU-Accelerated Next-Best-View Exploration of Articulated Scenes
Abstract:
Next-best-view algorithms are commonly used for
covering known scenes, for example in search, maintenance,
and mapping tasks. In this paper, we consider the problem of
planning a strategy for covering articulated environments where
the robot also has to manipulate objects to inspect obstructed
areas. This problem is particularly challenging due to the many
degrees of freedom resulting from the articulation. We propose
to exploit graphics processing units present in many embedded
devices to parallelize the computations of a greedy next-best-view
approach. We implemented algorithms for costmap computation,
path planning, as well as simulation and evaluation of viewpoint
candidates in OpenGL for Embedded Systems and benchmarked
the implementations on multiple device classes ranging from
smartphones to multi-GPU servers. We introduce a heuristic for
estimating a utility map from images rendered with strategically
placed spherical cameras and show in simulation experiments
that robots can successfully explore complex articulated scenes
with our system.


