Abstract
Small uncrewed aerial systems (sUASs) are useful tools for 3D reconstruction due to their speed, ease of use, and ability to access high-utility viewpoints. Today, most aerial survey approaches generate a preplanned coverage pattern assuming a planar target region. However, this is inefficient since it results in superfluous overlap and suboptimal viewing angles and does not utilize the entire flight envelope. In this work, we propose active path planning for photogrammetric reconstruction. Our main contribution is a view utility function based on Fisher information approximating the offline recon struction uncertainty. The metric enables online path planning to make in-flight decisions to collect geometrically informative image data in complex terrain. We evaluate our approach in a photorealistic simulation. A viewpoint selection study shows that our metric leads to faster and more precise reconstruction than state-of-the-art active planning metrics and adapts to different camera resolutions. Comparing our online planning approach to an ordinary fixed-wing aerial survey yields 3.2 × faster coverage of 16 ha undulated terrain without sacrificing precision. Show more
Permanent link
https://doi.org/10.3929/ethz-b-000617407Publication status
publishedExternal links
Book title
2023 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA)Pages / Article No.
Publisher
IEEEEvent
Organisational unit
03737 - Siegwart, Roland Y. / Siegwart, Roland Y.
Funding
ETH-10 20-1 - AVALMAPPER - Remote avalanche mapping with long flight-duration UAVs (ETHZ)
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