A GPU-Resident Pipeline for Multi-Robot 3D Inspection with Limited Perception

arXiv:2610.26106 · cs.RO, cs.MA · Submitted 2026-10-19 · Read on arXiv

cs.RO, cs.MA

Submitted: 2026-10-19

Updated: 2026-10-19

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

The gist: We present a complete, GPU-resident pipeline for multi-robot 3D inspection of underwater structures.

Abstract

We present a complete, GPU-resident pipeline for multi-robot 3D inspection of underwater structures. Given a triangle mesh and a fleet of K robots, each carrying a short-range, limited field-of-view camera, the pipeline computes 6-DOF trajectories that jointly cover a target fraction of the surface while minimizing a linearly interpolated makespan/total-cost objective. The joint problem is NP-hard, so we decompose it into five core stages - candidate viewpoint generation, visibility computation, set cover, min-max vehicle routing solved as a mixed integer program (MIP) with lifted Miller-Tucker-Zemlin subtour elimination, and priority-based multi-agent path finding with continuous-time inter-robot conflict checking - flanked by mesh loading and surface sampling as preprocessing and by trajectory smoothing as postprocessing. Our contributions are: an end-to-end GPU-accelerated integration of the five stages, with its kernel design documented; a GPU batch adaptation of Lien's epsilon-visibility with four custom CUDA kernels; a β-aware per-vehicle tour upper bound derived from the interpolated objective, supplementing the Desrochers-Laporte coefficient lift with forbidden-pair cuts; a 4D space-time extension of Zhou and Zeng's GPU parallel-frontier A*; and an experimental evaluation on 14 meshes (up to 7.2 M faces) that ablates the routing cuts and the parallel-frontier search, audits collision freedom and waypoint attainment after trajectory smoothing, and measures the end-to-end gap against analytical and LP-relaxation lower bounds. Code and raw results are publicly available.

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