Lifting Robot Exploration to 3D Environments

Autonomous mobile robots are a commonly agreed solution when it comes to explore environments that are inaccessible to humans such as search and rescue scenarios, plant and infrastructure inspection, or planetary exploration. In such environments the robot needs to deal with challenging 3D environments and needs to show advanced 3D exploration capabilities. While there exists excellent research for the individual aspects such as mapping, path planning, or exploration fully integrated systems that are able to master the 3D exploration are rare. In this paper we present an integrated robot system that is able to autonomously explore complex 3D environments in a safe way. Moreover, we present results of simulated and real experiments that show the skills of the proposed system.