Beyond Uncertainty: Risk-Aware Active View Acquisition for Safe Robot Navigation and 3D Scene Understanding with FisherRF

Abstract: The active view acquisition problem has been extensively studied in the context of robot navigation using NeRF and 3D Gaussian Splatting. To enhance scene reconstruction efficiency and ensure robot safety, we propose the Risk-aware Environment Masking (RaEM) framework. RaEM leverages coherent risk measures to dynamically prioritize safety-critical regions of the unknown environment, guiding active view acquisition algorithms toward identifying the next-best-view (NBV). Integrated with FisherRF, which selects the NBV by maximizing expected information gain, our framework achieves a dual objective: improving robot safety and increasing efficiency in risk-aware 3D scene reconstruction and understanding. Extensive high-fidelity experiments validate the effectiveness of our approach, demonstrating its ability to establish a robust and safety-focused framework for active robot exploration and 3D scene understanding.