Acta Geodaetica et Cartographica Sinica ›› 2024, Vol. 53 ›› Issue (6): 999-1012.doi: 10.11947/j.AGCS.2024.20230389

• Smart Surveying and Mapping • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Intelligent perception measurement technology of autonomous UAV for unknown environment

Li YAN1,2(), Yinghao ZHAO3, Jicheng DAI1, Bo XU1, Hong XIE1,2(), Yuquan ZHOU1,2   

  1. 1.School of Geodesy and Geomatics, Wuhan University, Wuhan 430079, China
    2.Hubei Luojia Laboratory, Wuhan 430079, China
    3.Institute of Surveying and Mapping, Information Engineering University, Zhengzhou 450001, China
  • Received:2023-09-06 Published:2024-07-22
  • Contact: Hong XIE E-mail:lyan@sgg.whu.edu.cn;hxie@sgg.whu.edu.cn
  • About author:YAN Li (1966—), male, professor, PhD supervisor, majors in photogrammetry, remote sensing and LiDAR. E-mail: lyan@sgg.whu.edu.cn
  • Supported by:
    The National Natural Science Foundation of China(42394061);The Science and Technology Major Project of Hubei Province(2021AAA010);Open Fund of Hubei Luojia Laboratory(220100053)

Abstract:

The development of intelligent surveying and mapping puts higher requirements for efficient, complete, and intelligent data collection, especially in GNSS-denied environments such as under-canopy, where traditional methods frequently struggle to achieve efficient and high-coverage measurements. To address the need for intelligent perception measurement of unknown environments, this paper introduces a novel intelligent perception measurement unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology and framework, using a UAV as a mobile platform. This paper integrates visual online autonomous localization with global exploration path planning. Initially, the framework incorporates a novel visual-inertial odometry (VIO) online localization algorithm based on point and line features, which solves the initial pose estimation through feature extraction and matching of point and line features, and then high-precision pose information of the UAV is generated in real-time using factor graph optimization. Furthermore, to ensure efficient and high-coverage autonomous UAV measurements in unknown environments, this paper employs a global optimal exploration path planning method that considers multi-level information to determine the local exploration targets, and then generates high-quality exploration trajectories in real time through trajectory search and optimization algorithm. Moreover, the framework was validated by a customized UAV platform, the step-by-step comparison and overall real-world test demonstrates that the localization and space exploration methods designed and adopted by the framework have significant advantages compared with the current representative methods. In addition, it achieves efficient and high-coverage full autonomous measurements in GNSS-denied local under-canopy environments, which establishes a solid theoretical and framework foundation for the further development of online intelligent perception in unknown scenarios.

Key words: autonomous UAV, intelligent perception measurements technology and framework, online visual localization, autonomous planning and space exploration

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