Return-to-Home Feasible Micro-Aerial Vehicle Exploration for 3D Gaussian Splatting Reconstruction

What happened

arXiv:2610.04013v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) enable rapid indoor 3D reconstruction for inspection and time-critical situational awareness, but must operate under strict flight-time budgets and safety constraints that require explicit return-to-home (RTH) feasibility with a conservative margin. A dense 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) map is optimized as the reconstruction target, while a lightweight Truncated Signed Distance Field (TSDF)/occupancy scaffold provides support for conservative collision checking and online construction of a sparse 3D Voronoi skeleton roadmap.

Viewpoints are selected on the roadmap using a flight-time-budget-aware objective and a lightweight receding-horizon lookahead to improve non-myopic exploration behavior. Results demonstrate improved or competitive performance relative to recent GS-based baselines under identical flight-time budgets.