FC-Vision: Real-Time Visibility-Aware Replanning for Occlusion-Free Aerial Target Structure Scanning in Unknown Environments

RA-L 2026
Chen Feng, Yang Xu, and Shaojie Shen

HKUST Aerial Robotics Group

📢 News

• [29/08/2026]: The released FC-Vision codebase and development environment setup are now available.
• [16/06/2026]: FC-Vision is accepted to RA-L. The source code is coming soon!

📜 Introduction

This repository maintains the implementation of "FC-Vision: Real-Time Visibility-Aware Replanning for Occlusion-Free Aerial Target Structure Scanning in Unknown Environments", owned by Chen Feng.

FC-Vision is a real-time visibility-aware replanning framework that advances UAVs to perform occlusion-free target scanning in unknown environments while maintaining safe and efficient flight, simple yet effective.

Please cite our paper if you use this project in your research:

@article{feng2026fc,
  title={FC-Vision: Real-Time Visibility-Aware Replanning for Occlusion-Free Aerial Target Structure Scanning in Unknown Environments},
  author={Feng, Chen and Xu, Yang and Shen, Shaojie},
  journal={IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters},
  year={2026},
  publisher={IEEE}
}

License Notice: This project is released under the PolyForm Noncommercial License 1.0.0 and is intended for non-commercial use only; commercial use is not permitted without explicit permission from the copyright owners. Please see LICENSE for details.

Please kindly star ⭐️ this project if it helps you. We take great efforts to develop and maintain it 😁.

🛠️ Installation

Prerequisite:

• ROS Noetic (Ubuntu 20.04)
• PCL 1.10
• Eigen 3.4.1
• Trajectory Optimization

  sudo apt update
  sudo apt install cpufrequtils
  sudo apt install libompl-dev

• AirSim Simulator

  git clone -b 4.25 git@github.com:EpicGames/UnrealEngine.git
  cd UnrealEngine
  ./Setup.sh
  ./GenerateProjectFiles.sh
  make

  git clone https://github.com/Microsoft/AirSim.git
  cd AirSim
  ./setup.sh
  ./build.sh

Modify your ~/Documents/AirSim/settings.json as the same as setting.json and download the UE simulation environments from Google Drive.

Compilation:

  catkin_make --cmake-args -Wno-dev

If you have installed Anaconda or Miniconda, please use catkin_make --cmake-args -Wno-dev -DPYTHON_EXECUTABLE=/usr/bin/python3.

🚀 Quick Start

• Change UE path in your machine

You should change UPROJECT and UE4_EDITOR with your own path in ./run_${DEMO_SCENARIO}.sh from script.

• Start the full stack

cd script && ./run_${DEMO_SCENARIO}.sh

where ${DEMO_SCENARIO} is east_church, kino_wall, or tunnel.

• Stop all services

cd script && ./kill_demo.sh

🤗 FC-Family Works

1. What is FC-Family?

We aim to develop intelligent active perception flight to realize Fast and reliable Coverage / sCanning / reConstruction / inspeCtion etc.

2. Projects list

• PredRecon (ICRA2023): Prediction-boosted Planner for Aerial Reconstruction.
• FC-Planner (ICRA2024): Highly Efficient Global Planner for Aerial Coverage.
• SOAR (IROS2024): Heterogenous Multi-UAV Planner for Aerial Reconstruction.
• FC-Vision (RA-L2026): Online Visibility-aware Replanning for Occlusion-free Aerial Scanning.
• FlyCo: Complete and Prompt-Driven System for Open-World Aerial 3D Structure Scanning.