Towards autonomous airborne mapping of urban environments

Abstract

This work documents our progress on building an unmanned aerial vehicle capable of autonomously mapping urban environments. This includes localization and tracking of the vehicle's pose, fusion of sensor-data from onboard GNSS receivers, IMUs, laserscanners and cameras as well as realtime path-planning and collision-avoidance. Currently, we focus on a physics-based approach to computing waypoints, which are subsequently used to steer the platform in three-dimensional space. Generation of efficient sensor trajectories for maximized information gain operates directly on unorganized point clouds, creating a perfect fit for environment mapping with commonly used LIDAR sensors and time-of-flight cameras. We present the algorithm's application to real sensor-data and analyze its performance in a virtual outdoor scenario.