Abstract
Abstract. The problem of autonomously mapping highly cluttered environments, such as urban and natural canyons, is intractable with the current UAV technology. The reason lies in the absence or unreliability of GNSS signals due to partial sky occlusion or multi-path effects. High quality carrier-phase observations are also required in efficient mapping paradigms, such as Assisted Aerial Triangulation, to achieve high ground accuracy without the need of dense networks of ground control points. In this work we consider a drone tandem in which the first drone flies outside the canyon, where GNSS constellation is ideal, visually tracks the second drone and provides an indirect position control for it. This enables both autonomous guidance and accurate mapping of GNSS restricted environments without the need of ground control points. We address the technical feasibility of this concept considering preliminary real-world experiments in comparable conditions and we perform a mapping accuracy prediction based on a simulation scenario.
Highlights
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming an important tool for surveyors, engineers and scientists as the number of costeffective and easy-to-use systems is increasing rapidly (Colomina and Molina, 2014)
In this work we propose a novel mapping concept, based on two UAVs, that enables the autonomous acquisition of aerial images in cluttered environments where the GNSS reception is degraded, such as deep gorges, natural and urban canyons
This paper has presented a new technique for mapping highly cluttered environment like natural or urban canyon
Summary
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming an important tool for surveyors, engineers and scientists as the number of costeffective and easy-to-use systems is increasing rapidly (Colomina and Molina, 2014). The dependency on the GNSS reception limits the applicability of UAV based mapping in many interesting scenarios, such as natural and urban canyons, in which the sky is in large part occluded by natural or artificial structures In these situations the quality of the constellation geometry is poor and severe multi-path effects can occur, introducing shifts in the position fix that could result in crashes, making GNSS based navigation extremely risky. Certain robots (called leaders) have better localization capabilities and higher quality sensors and can assist the robots which do detailed mapping (child robots) in localization Such hierarchy exist in the mapKITE project, where tactical grade navigation instruments are placed on a terrestrial vehicle, along with an optical target. We conclude the paper with some remarks and hints towards the real implementation
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