scholarly journals Collision Avoidance of Hexacopter UAV Based on LiDAR Data in Dynamic Environment

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 975 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jongho Park ◽  
Namhoon Cho

A reactive three-dimensional maneuver strategy for a multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is proposed based on the collision cone approach to avoid potential collision with a single moving obstacle detected by an onboard sensor. A Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) system is assumed to be mounted on a hexacopter to obtain the obstacle information from the collected point clouds. The collision cone approach is enhanced to appropriately deal with the moving obstacle with the help of a Kalman filter. The filter estimates the position, velocity, and acceleration of the obstacle by using the LiDAR data as the associated measurement. The obstacle state estimate is utilized to predict the future trajectories of the moving obstacle. The collision detection and obstacle avoidance maneuver decisions are made considering the predicted trajectory of the obstacle. Numerical simulations, including a Monte Carlo campaign, are conducted to verify the performance of the proposed collision avoidance algorithm.

2018 ◽  
Vol 10 (12) ◽  
pp. 1999 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wanqian Yan ◽  
Haiyan Guan ◽  
Lin Cao ◽  
Yongtao Yu ◽  
Sha Gao ◽  
...  

Forests play a key role in terrestrial ecosystems, and the variables extracted from single trees can be used in various fields and applications for evaluating forest production and assessing forest ecosystem services. In this study, we developed an automated hierarchical single-tree segmentation approach based on the high density three-dimensional (3D) Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) point clouds. First, this approach obtains normalized non-ground UAV points in data preprocessing; then, a voxel-based mean shift algorithm is used to roughly classify the non-ground UAV points into well-detected and under-segmentation clusters. Moreover, potential tree apices for each under-segmentation cluster are obtained with regard to profile shape curves and finally input to the normalized cut segmentation (NCut) algorithm to segment iteratively the under-segmentation cluster into single trees. We evaluated the proposed method using datasets acquired by a Velodyne 16E LiDAR system mounted on a multi-rotor UAV. The results showed that the proposed method achieves the average correctness, completeness, and overall accuracy of 0.90, 0.88, and 0.89, respectively, in delineating single trees. Comparative analysis demonstrated that our method provided a promising solution to reliable and robust segmentation of single trees from UAV LiDAR data with high point cloud density.


Author(s):  
M. Leslar

Using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) for the purposes of conducting high-accuracy aerial surveying has become a hot topic over the last year. One of the most promising means of conducting such a survey involves integrating a high-resolution non-metric digital camera with the UAV and using the principals of digital photogrammetry to produce high-density colorized point clouds. Through the use of stereo imagery, precise and accurate horizontal positioning information can be produced without the need for integration with any type of inertial navigation system (INS). Of course, some form of ground control is needed to achieve this result. Terrestrial LiDAR, either static or mobile, provides the solution. Points extracted from Terrestrial LiDAR can be used as control in the digital photogrammetry solution required by the UAV. In return, the UAV is an affordable solution for filling in the shadows and occlusions typically experienced by Terrestrial LiDAR. In this paper, the accuracies of points derived from a commercially available UAV solution will be examined and compared to the accuracies achievable by a commercially available LIDAR solution. It was found that the LiDAR system produced a point cloud that was twice as accurate as the point cloud produced by the UAV’s photogrammetric solution. Both solutions gave results within a few centimetres of the control field. In addition the about of planar dispersion on the vertical wall surfaces in the UAV point cloud was found to be multiple times greater than that from the horizontal ground based UAV points or the LiDAR data.


2019 ◽  
Vol 484 (6) ◽  
pp. 672-677
Author(s):  
A. V. Vokhmintcev ◽  
A. V. Melnikov ◽  
K. V. Mironov ◽  
V. V. Burlutskiy

A closed-form solution is proposed for the problem of minimizing a functional consisting of two terms measuring mean-square distances for visually associated characteristic points on an image and meansquare distances for point clouds in terms of a point-to-plane metric. An accurate method for reconstructing three-dimensional dynamic environment is presented, and the properties of closed-form solutions are described. The proposed approach improves the accuracy and convergence of reconstruction methods for complex and large-scale scenes.


Author(s):  
Jun Tang ◽  
Jiayi Sun ◽  
Cong Lu ◽  
Songyang Lao

Multi-unmanned aerial vehicle trajectory planning is one of the most complex global optimum problems in multi-unmanned aerial vehicle coordinated control. Results of recent research works on trajectory planning reveal persisting theoretical and practical problems. To mitigate them, this paper proposes a novel optimized artificial potential field algorithm for multi-unmanned aerial vehicle operations in a three-dimensional dynamic space. For all purposes, this study considers the unmanned aerial vehicles and obstacles as spheres and cylinders with negative electricity, respectively, while the targets are considered spheres with positive electricity. However, the conventional artificial potential field algorithm is restricted to a single unmanned aerial vehicle trajectory planning in two-dimensional space and usually fails to ensure collision avoidance. To deal with this challenge, we propose a method with a distance factor and jump strategy to resolve common problems such as unreachable targets and ensure that the unmanned aerial vehicle does not collide into the obstacles. The method takes companion unmanned aerial vehicles as the dynamic obstacles to realize collaborative trajectory planning. Besides, the method solves jitter problems using the dynamic step adjustment method and climb strategy. It is validated in quantitative test simulation models and reasonable results are generated for a three-dimensional simulated urban environment.


Author(s):  
T. Wakita ◽  
J. Susaki

In this study, we propose a method to accurately extract vegetation from terrestrial three-dimensional (3D) point clouds for estimating landscape index in urban areas. Extraction of vegetation in urban areas is challenging because the light returned by vegetation does not show as clear patterns as man-made objects and because urban areas may have various objects to discriminate vegetation from. The proposed method takes a multi-scale voxel approach to effectively extract different types of vegetation in complex urban areas. With two different voxel sizes, a process is repeated that calculates the eigenvalues of the planar surface using a set of points, classifies voxels using the approximate curvature of the voxel of interest derived from the eigenvalues, and examines the connectivity of the valid voxels. We applied the proposed method to two data sets measured in a residential area in Kyoto, Japan. The validation results were acceptable, with F-measures of approximately 95% and 92%. It was also demonstrated that several types of vegetation were successfully extracted by the proposed method whereas the occluded vegetation were omitted. We conclude that the proposed method is suitable for extracting vegetation in urban areas from terrestrial light detection and ranging (LiDAR) data. In future, the proposed method will be applied to mobile LiDAR data and the performance of the method against lower density of point clouds will be examined.


2019 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Luis Gézero ◽  
Carlos Antunes

The railway structures need constant monitoring and maintenance to ensure the train circulation safety. Quality information concerning the infrastructure geometry, namely the three-dimensional linear elements, are crucial for that processes. Along with this work, a method to automated extract three-dimensional linear elements from point clouds collected by terrestrial mobile LiDAR systems along railways is presented. The proposed method takes advantage of the stored cloud point’s attributes as an alternative to complex geometric methods applied over the point’s cloud coordinates. Based on the assumption that the linear elements to extract are roughly parallel to the rail tracks and therefore to the system trajectory, the stored scan angle value was used to restrict the number of cloud points that represents the linear elements. A simple algorithm is then applied to that restricted number of points to get the three-dimensional polylines geometry. The obtained values of completeness, correctness and quality, validate the use of the methodology for linear elements extraction from mobile LiDAR data gathered along railway environments.


Author(s):  
C. Serifoglu ◽  
O. Gungor ◽  
V. Yilmaz

Digital Elevation Model (DEM) generation is one of the leading application areas in geomatics. Since a DEM represents the bare earth surface, the very first step of generating a DEM is to separate the ground and non-ground points, which is called ground filtering. Once the point cloud is filtered, the ground points are interpolated to generate the DEM. LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) point clouds have been used in many applications thanks to their success in representing the objects they belong to. Hence, in the literature, various ground filtering algorithms have been reported to filter the LiDAR data. Since the LiDAR data acquisition is still a costly process, using point clouds generated from the UAV images to produce DEMs is a reasonable alternative. In this study, point clouds with three different densities were generated from the aerial photos taken from a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) to examine the effect of point density on filtering performance. The point clouds were then filtered by means of five different ground filtering algorithms as Progressive Morphological 1D (PM1D), Progressive Morphological 2D (PM2D), Maximum Local Slope (MLS), Elevation Threshold with Expand Window (ETEW) and Adaptive TIN (ATIN). The filtering performance of each algorithm was investigated qualitatively and quantitatively. The results indicated that the ATIN and PM2D algorithms showed the best overall ground filtering performances. The MLS and ETEW algorithms were found as the least successful ones. It was concluded that the point clouds generated from the UAVs can be a good alternative for LiDAR data.


Author(s):  
S. Kubota ◽  
Y. Kawai ◽  
R. Kadotani

River administration facilities such as levees and river walls play a major role in preventing flooding due to heavy rain. The forms of such facilities must be constantly monitored for alteration due to rain and running water, and limited human resources and budgets make it necessary to efficiently maintain river administration facilities. During maintenance, inspection results are commonly recorded on paper documents. Continuous inspection and repair using information systems are an on-going challenge. This study proposes a maintenance management system for river facilities that uses three-dimensional data to solve these problems and make operation and maintenance more efficient. The system uses three-dimensional data to visualize river facility deformation and its process, and it has functions that visualize information about river management at any point in the three-dimensional data. The three-dimensional data is generated by photogrammetry using a camera on an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle.


Author(s):  
E. Hadas ◽  
G. Jozkow ◽  
A. Walicka ◽  
A. Borkowski

The estimation of dendrometric parameters has become an important issue for agriculture planning and for the efficient management of orchards. Airborne Laser Scanning (ALS) data is widely used in forestry and many algorithms for automatic estimation of dendrometric parameters of individual forest trees were developed. Unfortunately, due to significant differences between forest and fruit trees, some contradictions exist against adopting the achievements of forestry science to agricultural studies indiscriminately.<br> In this study we present the methodology to identify individual trees in apple orchard and estimate heights of individual trees, using high-density LiDAR data (3200&amp;thinsp;points/m<sup>2</sup>) obtained with Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with Velodyne HDL32-E sensor. The processing strategy combines the alpha-shape algorithm, principal component analysis (PCA) and detection of local minima. The alpha-shape algorithm is used to separate tree rows. In order to separate trees in a single row, we detect local minima on the canopy profile and slice polygons from alpha-shape results. We successfully separated 92&amp;thinsp;% of trees in the test area. 6&amp;thinsp;% of trees in orchard were not separated from each other and 2&amp;thinsp;% were sliced into two polygons. The RMSE of tree heights determined from the point clouds compared to field measurements was equal to 0.09&amp;thinsp;m, and the correlation coefficient was equal to 0.96. The results confirm the usefulness of LiDAR data from UAV platform in orchard inventory.


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