UAV low-altitude obstacle detection based on the fusion of LiDAR and camera

In this paper, aiming at the flying scene of the small unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) in the low-altitude suburban environment, we choose the sensor configuration scheme of LiDAR and visible light camera, and design the static and dynamic obstacle detection algorithms based on sensor fusion. For static obstacles such as power lines and buildings in the low-altitude environment, the way that image-assisted verification of point clouds is used to fuse the contour information of the images and the depth information of the point clouds to obtain the location and size of static obstacles. For unknown dynamic obstacles such as rotary-wing UAVs, the IMM-UKF algorithm is designed to fuse the distance measurement information of point clouds and the high precision angle measurement information of image to achieve accurate estimation of the location and velocity of the dynamic obstacles. We build an experimental platform to verify the effectiveness of the obstacle detection algorithm in actual scenes and evaluate the relevant performance indexes.