aeplanner is an exploration planning package for 3d environments. It subscribes to an OctoMap and will propose waypoints that maximizes the information gain while minimizing the traversed distance. For a more detailed description see our paper.

Use aeplanner? If you are using aeplanner, please cite our paper Efficient Autonomous Exploration Planning of Large-Scale 3-D Environments in IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, vol. 4, no. 2, pp. 1699-1706, April 2019.

BibTeX:

@ARTICLE{8633925,
    author={M. {Selin} and M. {Tiger} and D. {Duberg} and F. {Heintz} and P. {Jensfelt}},
    journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
    title={Efficient Autonomous Exploration Planning of Large-Scale 3-D Environments},
    year={2019},
    volume={4},
    number={2},
    pages={1699-1706},
    keywords={Planning;Sensors;Uncertainty;Drones;Mobile robots;Path planning;Search and rescue robots;motion and path planning;mapping},
    doi={10.1109/LRA.2019.2897343},
    ISSN={2377-3766},
    month={April},}

This repository has been tested with:

Ubuntu 16.04
ROS Kinetic (Desktop full installation)
catkin tools
catkin simple
OctoMap

it might work with other setups, but no guarantees are given.

1. You are running Ubuntu 16.04
2. You are using bash, zsh is also possible with some modifications.
3. You have ros-kinetic-desktop-installed, otherwise follow installation instructions here
4. You have created a workspace in ~/catkin_ws, without running catkin_make. If in another location these things need to be modified.
5. You have installed catkin tools

1. You have installed octomap if not install it by running sudo apt-get install "ros-kinetic-octomap-*" or install from source.

2. Catkin simple is needed to build the rtree package

cd ~/catkin_ws/src
git clone https://github.com/catkin/catkin_simple.git

3. PIGain depends on rtree which in turn needs libspatialindex (note this rtree is different from the one above).

pip install rtree
sudo apt-get install libspatialindex-dev

If you do not already have a workspace, set up a new one.

mkdir -p ~/catkin_ws/src
cd ~/catkin_ws
catkin init
catkin build

Clone this package (make sure that you are in catkin_ws/src)

cd ~/catkin_ws/src/
git clone https://github.com/mseln/aeplanner.git
cd ..
catkin build

To run the example directly without having to integrate the interface, the kth uav simulation package can be installed, see:

https://github.com/danielduberg/kth_uav

Read the Assumptions and follow the install instructions on that page.

If you get couldn't find python module jinja2: install jinja2 by running:

sudo apt-get install python-jinja2

If you get No rule to make target '/home/rpl/catkin_ws/src/kth_uav/Firmware/Tools/sitl_gazebo/PROTOBUF_PROTOC_EXECUTABLE-NOTFOUND', needed by 'Groundtruth.pb.cc'. Stop., install libprotobuf by running:

sudo apt-get install protobuf-compiler

If you get ImportError: No module named future install it by running:

pip install future

If you get Could not find a package configuration file provided by "geographic_msgs" with any of the following names: install it by running:

sudo apt-get install ros-kinetic-geographic-msgs

If you get Could NOT find GeographicLib (missing: GeographicLib_LIBRARIES GeographicLib_INCLUDE_DIRS) fix it by installing:

sudo apt-get install libgeographic-dev

If gazebo is complaining about GeographicLib exception: File not readable /usr/share/GeographicLib/geoids/egm96-5.pgm, install geographiclib-tools and run the install script again.

sudo apt-get install geographiclib-tools
sudo ./kth_uav/mavros/mavros/scripts/install_geographiclib_datasets.sh

When running roslaunch simulation simulation.launch if you get Arg xml is <arg default="$(find mavlink_sitl_gazebo)/worlds/empty.world" name="world"/> fix it by changing line 14 and 15 in kth_uav/Firmware/launch/mavros_posix_sitl.launch to

    <arg name="world"/>  
    <arg name="sdf"/>

do the same with line in file 12 and 13 kth_uav/Firmware/launch/posix_sitl.launch.