Industry Monitor Humanoid Industrial & Cobot AGV / AMR Quadruped Reducers · Servos · Sensors Drones & Autonomy Embodied AI
Robos News
Robotics

AirSplan: Risk-Aware Motion Planning for Quadrotors in Cluttered 3D Gaussian Splats

arXiv:2609.21226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadrotors are increasingly deployed in applications such as agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and maintenance. In each of these applications, the robot must navigate complex scene geometry while remaining strictly collision-free. Unlike in ground domains, even minor collisions for aerial vehicles can result in the loss of the robot. This safety requirement induces a pair of technical challenges. First, the environment must be represented wi

Published September 21, 2026 · Category: Robotics

Overview

arXiv:2609.21226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quadrotors are increasingly deployed in applications such as agriculture, infrastructure inspection, and maintenance. In each of these applications, the robot must navigate complex scene geometry while remaining strictly collision-free. Unlike in ground domains, even minor collisions for aerial vehicles can result in the loss of the robot. This safety requirement induces a pair of technical challenges. First, the environment must be represented with sufficient fidelity to encode complex structure, even when no ground-truth obstacle data is available. Second, a motion planner must leverage this representation to determine a collision-free path to the goal. This paper proposes a system that addresses these complementary challenges. The proposed method, AirSplan, adopts a normalized variant of 3D Gaussian Splatting that encodes high-fidelity scene geometry. It then applies a novel reachability-based motion planner that leverages the differential flatness of quadrotors to compute continuous-time collision constraints that tightly overapproximate the robot's occupancy. Experiments demonstrate that AirSplan successfully finds a path in 81.2% of challenging test cases, a significant improvement over the nearest baseline method's 51.2%.

Source

Originally published at arxiv.org.

Related Articles

Robos News Newsroom

Robos News reports on robotics research, components, manufacturers, field deployments, and industrial automation worldwide. Tip our newsroom: [email protected]

Email the newsroom →
Reporting standard: Product specifications, deployment counts, and performance claims are attributed to their source. Safety-critical decisions should be based on the applicable technical documentation and validation for the operating environment.
More from News →