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arXiv · 2603.14639

Seeing Where to Deploy: Metric RGB-Based Traversability Analysis for Aerial-to-Ground Hidden Space Inspection

Seoyoung Lee·Shaekh Mohammad Shithil·Durgakant Pushp·Lantao Liu·Zhangyang Wang
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Abstract

Inspection of confined infrastructure such as culverts often requires accessing hidden spaces whose entrances are reachable primarily from elevated viewpoints. Aerial-ground cooperation enables a UAV to deploy a compact UGV for interior exploration, but selecting a suitable deployment region from aerial observations requires metric terrain reasoning involving scale ambiguity, reconstruction uncertainty, and terrain semantics. We present a metric RGB-based geometric-semantic reconstruction and traversability analysis framework for aerial-to-ground hidden space inspection. A feed-forward multi-view RGB reconstruction backbone produces dense geometry, while temporally consistent semantic segmentation yields a 3D semantic map. To enable deployment-relevant measurements without requiring LiDAR-based dense mapping, we introduce an embodied motion prior that recovers metric scale by aligning predicted camera motion with onboard platform egomotion. From the metrically grounded reconstruction, we construct a confidence-aware geometric-semantic traversability map and evaluate candidate deployment zones under reachability constraints. Experiments on a tethered UAV-UGV platform demonstrate reliable deployment-zone identification in hidden space scenarios.

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Seoyoung Lee, Shaekh Mohammad Shithil, Durgakant Pushp, Lantao Liu, Zhangyang Wang. 2026-03-15. Seeing Where to Deploy: Metric RGB-Based Traversability Analysis for Aerial-to-Ground Hidden Space Inspection. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.14639

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