3D modeling based on multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles with the optimal paths

Recently, advanced and automated devices are used for natural disasters project. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is considered as an advanced technology to be used in various areas where are hard for human to arrive at. This paper presents a novel method to build a 3D model of disaster areas based on multiple UAVs with the optimal paths. We divide disaster areas in-to key survey regions and normal survey regions based on partitioning the photo taken by a conventional satellite. Key survey regions which require a comprehensive survey contain much more complicated buildings and structures compared with those in normal survey regions. Some of the UAVs are used to comprehensively scan the key survey regions. The others are used to roughly scan the normal survey regions. All of the UAVs finish those scanning tasks in cooperation. A math model is built to find the optimal paths for multiple UAVs to scan the whole area with the minimum cost of time. The experimental results show that the number of photos reduces 41.07%, the scan time reduces 33.23% and the time consumed by building the 3D model reduces 38.75% compared with the other methods. To the best of our knowledge, the system is the first to use multiple UAVs to build 3D model.