An integrated UAV navigation system based on geo-registered 3D point cloud

Abstract

The autonomous navigation of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) require a lot of sensing modalities to improve their cruise efficiency. This paper presents a system for autonomous navigation and path planning of UAVs in GPS-denied environment based on the fusion of geo-registered 3D point clouds with proprioceptive sensors (IMU, odometry and barometer) and the 2D Google maps. The contributions of this paper are illustrated as follows: 1) combination of 2D map and geo-registered 3D point clouds; 2) registration of local point cloud to global geo-registered 3D point clouds; 3) integration of visual odometry, IMU, GPS and barometer. Experiment and simulation results demonstrate the efficacy and robustness of the proposed system.