# Online Next-Best-View Planner for 3D-Exploration and Inspection With a Mobile Manipulator Robot

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.10113 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.10113/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 18 Mar 2022.

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [RoboEXP: Action-Conditioned Scene Graph via Interactive Exploration for Robotic Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15487/) (2024)
- [Active-Perceptive Motion Generation for Mobile Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.00433/) (2023)
- [SaPaVe: Towards Active Perception and Manipulation in Vision-Language-Action Models for Robotics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12193/) (2026)
- [ActiveMimic: Egocentric Video Pretraining with Active Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.06194/) (2026)
- [Revolutionizing Battery Disassembly: The Design and Implementation of a Battery Disassembly Autonomous Mobile Manipulator Robot(BEAM-1)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06590/) (2024)
- [DNRSelect: Active Best View Selection for Deferred Neural Rendering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12150/) (2025)
- [STAIR: Semantic-Targeted Active Implicit Reconstruction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11233/) (2024)
- [Semantic-aware Next-Best-View for Multi-DoFs Mobile System in Search-and-Acquisition based Visual Perception](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16507/) (2024)
- [A New Clustering-based View Planning Method for Building Inspection with Drone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01435/) (2024)
- [R2-Mesh: Reinforcement Learning Powered Mesh Reconstruction via Geometry and Appearance Refinement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10135/) (2024)
- [Boundary Exploration of Next Best View Policy in 3D Robotic Scanning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.10444/) (2024)
- [R-Meshfusion: Reinforcement Learning Powered Sparse-View Mesh Reconstruction with Diffusion Priors](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.11946/) (2025)
- [Low Resolution Next Best View for Robot Packing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.04228/) (2025)
- [Language-in-the-Loop Culvert Inspection on the Erie Canal](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.21370/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Robotic systems performing end-user oriented autonomous exploration can be deployed in different scenarios which not only require mapping but also simultaneous inspection of regions of interest for the end-user. In this work, we propose a novel Next-Best-View (NBV) planner which can perform full exploration and user-oriented exploration with inspection of the regions of interest using a mobile manipulator robot. We address the exploration-inspection problem as an instance of Multi-Objective Optimization (MOO) and propose a weighted-sum-based information gain function for computing NBVs for the RGB-D camera mounted on the arm. For both types of exploration tasks, we compare our approach with an existing state-of-the-art exploration method as the baseline and demonstrate our improvements in terms of total volume mapped and lower computational requirements. The real experiments with a mobile manipulator robot demonstrate the practicability and effectiveness of our approach outdoors.