Fast and Stable UAV Exploration With Incorporating Localization Uncertainty

The high maneuverability and freedom of un-manned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to swiftly explore complex and unknown environments while establishing corresponding maps is a typical application of UAVs. However, existing methods mainly focus on enhancing exploration efficiency while over-looking the impact of localization on quality and stability. This study introduces a rapid and robust frontier-based au-tonomous exploration method for UAVs, which incorporates localization uncertainty into the framework. This integration ensures coverage of more information-rich areas during fron-tier exploration, thereby reducing mileage drift and preventing localization failures, thus enhancing the exploration robustness. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted, demonstrating the effectiveness of the proposed method compared to the state-of-the-art approach. To foster future research, we make the code in this work publicly available for any researcher at https://github.com/Joosool/FSUE.git.