Inspection sparsification improves robot tours with fewer waypoints
Inspection-SPARS: Task-Oriented Sparse Roadmaps for Inspection Planning
Robotics
Summary
Planning robot paths to check certain points needs lots of possible routes, which slows down finding the best path. The authors present Inspection-SPARS, a method that shrinks the search map while still covering all points and keeping route quality high. This helps robots find shorter paths faster by focusing only on important waypoints. Their tests in 3D environments show it reduces route size by 4 to 8 times and can produce tours up to 25% shorter than before.
What this means in practice
- •For robotics engineers: Create faster inspection routes in complex 3D spaces by generating smaller, high-quality path maps that cover all required points.
- •For autonomous drone operators: Plan efficient drone tours inspecting infrastructure points with reduced computational effort and improved route length.
Authors
Adir Morgan, Oren Salzman, Kiril Solovey
Abstract
Inspection planning seeks a minimum-length collision-free robot tour that observes a given set of points of interest (POIs). Sampling-based methods reduce this continuous problem to a graph inspection planning (GIP) problem over a discrete roadmap, which is then solved using combinatorial solvers. Dense roadmaps capture diverse inspection viewpoints and motion shortcuts, and thus admit higher-quality solutions, but they induce large combinatorial search spaces on which state-of-the-art GIP solvers struggle to find good solutions within practical time budgets. Roadmap sparsification---restructuring a dense roadmap into a compact representation that preserves connectivity and path lengths---can alleviate this burden. However, existing sparsification approaches are either agnostic to the underlying inspection task, or strive to ensure coverage of the POIs without accounting for the quality of the resulting inspection plan. We present Inspection-SPARS, which is, to our knowledge, the first inspection-roadmap sparsifier with POI coverage and path-quality guarantees relative to the dense roadmap. To this end, we generalize the SPARS framework, a popular task-agnostic sparsifier, from purely geometric criteria to task-oriented ones, introducing an inspection-aware vertex admission mechanism that treats POI coverage as a first-class sparsification criterion alongside connectivity and path quality. Experiments in realistic 3D environments show that Inspection-SPARS reduces vertex and edge counts by 4-8x while preserving coverage, allowing the GIP solver to compute tours up to 25% shorter than with the dense roadmap or state-of-the-art inspection roadmap. More broadly, Inspection-SPARS shows that sparsification can be made task-aware without sacrificing guarantees on solution quality.