Anthony Brunel, Amine Bourki, Oliver Strauss and Cedric Demonceaux

The use of Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) equipped with odometry- and depth sensors has become predominant for a wide variety of challenging industrial applications such as the autonomous exploration (i.e., digital mapping), and inspection (i.e., online surface reconstruction) of unknown facilities. However, despite the ongoing attention these topics receive, autonomous exploration methods still lack common evaluation grounds to assess their relative performance in terms of data and experimental tools. We address this deficit by introducing FLYBO, the first unified benchmark environment that focuses on the performance of such flying robots in terms of autonomous exploration and online surface reconstruction. It includes (i) 11 challenging realistic indoor- and outdoor datasets of increasing complexity and size, with ground-truth, (ii) a comprehensive benchmark of 6 of the top-performing autonomous exploration algorithms including methods without publicly available code. (iii) A unified experimental system factorizes the routines shared by autonomous planners in order to fairly and accurately assess their exploration performance in a controlled environment. All of the aforementioned contributions will be made avilable upon acceptance, via a dedicated project website and leaderboard.