# FIESTA: Fast Incremental Euclidean Distance Fields for Online Motion Planning of Aerial Robots

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1903.02144 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.02144/

## Key facts

- Cited by 31 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 6 Mar 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [iSDF: Real-Time Neural Signed Distance Fields for Robot Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.02296/) (2022)
- [Articulated Object Interaction in Unknown Scenes with Whole-Body Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10534/) (2021)
- [Active Neural Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.16246/) (2023)
- [What Is The Best 3D Scene Representation for Robotics? From Geometric to Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03422/) (2025)
- [Regularized Deep Signed Distance Fields for Reactive Motion Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04739/) (2022)
- [N2M2: Learning Navigation for Arbitrary Mobile Manipulation Motions in Unseen and Dynamic Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.08737/) (2022)
- [DPMPC-Planner: A real-time UAV trajectory planning framework for complex static environments with dynamic obstacles](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07024/) (2021)
- [From SLAM to Situational Awareness: Challenges and Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.00273/) (2021)
- [A Real-Time Online Learning Framework for Joint 3D Reconstruction and Semantic Segmentation of Indoor Scenes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.05246/) (2021)
- [A Deep Signed Directional Distance Function for Object Shape Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.11024/) (2021)
- [Vision-aided UAV navigation and dynamic obstacle avoidance using gradient-based B-spline trajectory optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.07003/) (2022)
- [MARG: MAstering Risky Gap Terrains for Legged Robots with Elevation Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.20036/) (2025)
- [AirHunt: Bridging VLM Semantics and Continuous Planning for Efficient Aerial Object Navigation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.12742/) (2026)
- [HIO-SDF: Hierarchical Incremental Online Signed Distance Fields](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.09463/) (2023)
- [Distance and Collision Probability Estimation from Gaussian Surface Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00186/) (2024)
- [Neural Configuration-Space Barriers for Manipulation Planning and Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04929/) (2025)
- [Prof. Robot: Differentiable Robot Rendering Without Static and Self-Collisions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11269/) (2025)
- [EUGens: Efficient, Unified, and General Dense Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.22563/) (2026)
- [Autonomous Implicit Indoor Scene Reconstruction with Frontier Exploration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.10218/) (2024)
- [Multi-robot autonomous 3D reconstruction using Gaussian splatting with Semantic guidance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.02249/) (2024)
- [DUViN: Diffusion-Based Underwater Visual Navigation via Knowledge-Transferred Depth Features](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02983/) (2025)
- [OREN: Octree Residual Network for Real-Time Euclidean Signed Distance Mapping](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.18999/) (2025)
- [From Distances to Trajectories: Real-Time Signed Distance Function Mapping and Distance-Accelerated Motion Planning for UAVs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19306/) (2026)
- [A Review of Scene Representations for Robot Manipulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11275/) (2022)
- [Pseudo-Trilateral Adversarial Training for Domain Adaptive Traversability Prediction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14370/) (2023)
- [LGSDF: Continual Global Learning of Signed Distance Fields Aided by Local Updating](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05187/) (2024)
- [EUGens: Efficient, Unified, and General Dense Layers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.09771/) (2024)
- [Unified Linear Parametric Map Modeling and Perception-aware Trajectory Planning for Mobile Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.09340/) (2025)
- [NeRC: Neural Ranging Correction through Differentiable Moving Horizon Location Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.14336/) (2025)
- [Safe Path Planning and Observation Quality Enhancement Strategy for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles in Water Quality Monitoring Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.21375/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) is useful for online motion planning of aerial robots since it can easily query the distance and gradient information against obstacles. Fast incrementally built ESDF map is the bottleneck for conducting real-time motion planning. In this paper, we investigate this problem and propose a mapping system called FIESTA to build global ESDF map incrementally. By introducing two independent updating queues for inserting and deleting obstacles separately, and using Indexing Data Structures and Doubly Linked Lists for map maintenance, our algorithm updates as few as possible nodes using a BFS framework. Our ESDF map has high computational performance and produces near-optimal results. We show our method outperforms other up-to-date methods in term of performance and accuracy by both theory and experiments. We integrate FIESTA into a completed quadrotor system and validate it by both simulation and onboard experiments. We release our method as open-source software for the community.