Abstract
Partial observability remains a fundamental challenge in robotic navigation, where limited sensor coverage and occlusions leave large portions of the environment unobserved. Existing scene completion methods primarily focus on improving incomplete mapping or reconstructing partially observed 3D structures, but rarely investigate how scene completion can be designed to benefit downstream tasks such as path planning. In this work, we propose a path-planning-oriented 3D scene completion framework that moves beyond pure occupancy modeling toward a coupled geometric formulation. Specifically, given partial LiDAR observations as input, the proposed framework jointly predicts completed Truncated Unsigned Distance Field (TUDF)-based continuous geometric representations and voxel-wise occupancy maps. This coupled representation allows the network to better reason about obstacle boundaries and free-space geometry. To fully exploit the synergy between the two representations, we introduce a bidirectionally coupled learning scheme, where TUDF features provide dense geometric guidance to improve occupancy reconstruction, while occupancy features in turn offer complementary structural constraints that refine distance-field estimation. Consequently, the proposed network directly predicts complete occupancy and TUDF representations, allowing seamless integration of TUDF into trajectory planning without post-processing. Extensive experiments on unseen environments demonstrate that the proposed method consistently improves both geometric reconstruction quality and downstream planning performance.
Abstract (translated)
URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36543
