A Next-Best-View Method for Complex 3D Environment Exploration Using Robotic Arm with Hand-Eye System

The ability to autonomously generate up-to-date 3D models of robotic workcells is critical for advancing smart manufacturing, yet existing Next-Best-View (NBV) methods often rely on paradigms ill-suited for the fixed-base manipulators found in dynamic industrial environments. To address this gap, this paper proposes a novel NBV method for the complete exploration of a 6-DOF robotic arm’s workspace. Our approach integrates collision-based information gain metric, a potential field technique to generate candidate views from exploration frontiers, and a tunable fitness function to balance information gain with motion cost. The method was rigorously tested in three simulated scenarios and validated on a physical industrial robot. Results demonstrate that our approach successfully maps the majority of the workspace in all setups, with a balanced weighting strategy proving most effective for combining exploration speed and path efficiency, a finding confirmed in the real-world experiment. We conclude that our method provides a practical and robust solution for autonomous workspace mapping, offering a flexible, training-free approach that advances the state-of-the-art for on-demand 3D model generation in industrial robotics.