Evidence map›Paper›PMID 42356758›Full record

ArticleSensors (Basel, Switzerland)2026

ORACLE: Object-Centric Autonomous Coverage Exploration Planner for Discrete Trunk Inspection Under Canopy.

Juqi Wei, Hai Wang

Abstract read
In one paragraph

Article in Sensors (Basel, Switzerland), 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.

0numbers the graph read from it
0cells of the map it votes in
0citing papers in PubMed
–field-weighted citation impact
1 · What the graph read from it

What it found

Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.

The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.

2 · The registry

The trial behind it

Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.

Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.

3 · Its place in the literature

Who cites it

0 citing papers in PubMed.

No citing paper in PubMed yet.

4 · The record

Corrections and comments

PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.

5 · Who and what money

Authors and funding

2 authors.

Juqi WeiSchool of Automotive and Traffic Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China.
Hai WangSchool of Automotive and Traffic Engineering, Jiangsu University, Zhenjiang 212013, China.ORCID 0000-0002-9136-8091

Funding

Jiangsu Province Frontier Technology Research and Development Plan BF2025082Key Research and Development Program of Jiangsu Province BE2023074National Natural Science Foundation of China 52225212National Natural Science Foundation of China 52472433
6 · The paper itself

Abstract

Autonomous inspection of discrete obstacles (e.g., tree trunks in orchards and forests) requires UAVs to visit every target with proper observation distance and heading, while simultaneously exploring the unknown environment. Existing space-guided exploration methods focus on eliminating unknown space and are inherently agnostic to the inspection targets themselves, leading to incomplete coverage and redundant traversal. We observe that the obstacles themselves encode the spatial topology of the environment and can serve as natural planning anchors. Based on this insight, we propose ORACLE, an Object-centric Autonomous Coverage Exploration framework that shifts the planning paradigm from space-guided to target-guided exploration. ORACLE integrates: (1) an online target detection and persistent identification module via occupied-voxel connected component labelling, (2) a density-aware global coverage planner that modulates ATSP costs to prioritize target-dense regions, and (3) a target-guided local planner that replaces frontier viewpoints with direct obstacle observation points in a Sequential Ordering Problem formulation. Experiments in two point-cloud environments reconstructed from real-world forests with contrasting tree densities (Environment I: 50 trunks, n¯=1.56; Environment II: 70 trunks, n¯=2.19; both with non-uniform spacing) show that ORACLE achieves 98.8% and 99.7% target coverage compared to 22.7% and 25.1% for the space-guided baseline, while reducing the mission overhead ratio from 202.9% to 129.2% (Environment I) and from 176.8% to 126.6% (Environment II). Ablation studies confirm that zone reactivation is the decisive factor for coverage completeness (-18.8 and -17.2 percentage points when disabled in Environments I and II, respectively) and that density weighting improves path efficiency.

Indexed as

ATSPautonomous explorationcoverage path planningobject-centric planningSOPUAV inspection

Identifiers

PMID42356758
PMCPMC13306790

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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.