SOAR: Simultaneous Exploration and Photographing with Heterogeneous UAVs for Fast Autonomous Reconstruction

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have gained sig- nificant popularity in scene reconstruction. This paper presents SOAR, a LiDAR-Visual heterogeneous multi-UAV system specif- ically designed for fast autonomous reconstruction of complex environments. Our system comprises a LiDAR-equipped ex- plorer with a large field-of-view (FoV), alongside photographers equipped with cameras. To ensure rapid acquisition of the scene’s surface geometry, we employ a surface frontier-based exploration strategy for the explorer. As the surface is progres- sively explored, we identify the uncovered areas and generate viewpoints incrementally. These viewpoints are then assigned to photographers through solving a Consistent Multiple Depot Multiple Traveling Salesman Problem (Consistent-MDMTSP), which optimizes scanning efficiency while ensuring task con- sistency. Finally, photographers utilize the assigned viewpoints to determine optimal coverage paths for acquiring images. We present extensive benchmarks in the realistic simulator, which validates the performance of SOAR compared with classical and state-of-the-art methods. For more details, please see our project page at sysu-star.github.io/SOAR.