OMEGA: Efficient Occlusion-Aware Navigation for Air-Ground Robots in Dynamic Environments via State Space Model

Abstract

<p>Air-ground robots (AGRs) are widely used in surveillance and disaster response due to their exceptional mobility and versatility (i.e., flying and driving). Current AGR navigation systems perform well in static occlusion-prone environments (e.g., indoors) by using 3D semantic occupancy networks to predict occlusions for complete local mapping and then computing Euclidean Signed Distance Field (ESDF) for path planning. However, these systems face challenges in dynamic scenes (e.g., crowds) due to limitations in perception networks' low prediction accuracy and path planners' high computation overhead. In this paper, we propose Omega, which contains OccMamba with an Efficient AGR-plAnner to address the above-mentioned problems. OccMamba adopts a novel architecture that separates semantic and occupancy prediction into independent branches, incorporating the mamba module to efficiently extract semantic and geometric features in 3D environments. This ensures the network can learn long-distance dependencies and improve prediction accuracy. Features are then combined within the Bird's Eye View (BEV) space to minimise computational overhead during feature fusion. The resulting semantic occupancy map is integrated into the local map, providing occlusion awareness of the dynamic environment. Our AGR-Planner utilizes this local map and employs Kinodynamic A∗ search and gradient-based trajectory optimization for ESDF-free and energy-efficient planning. Experiments demonstrate that OccMamba outperforms the state-of-the-art 3D semantic occupancy network with 25.0% mIoU. End-to-end navigation experiments in dynamic scenes verify OMEGA's efficiency, achieving a 96% average planning success rate.</p>