Journal
DRONES
Volume 6, Issue 9, Pages -Publisher
MDPI
DOI: 10.3390/drones6090256
Keywords
unmanned aerial vehicle; exploration planning; trajectory planning; plantation forests
Categories
Funding
- University of Auckland Doctoral Scholarship
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Modern plantation forest procedures often rely on manual data acquisition, which limits the quantity and quality of the collected data. This study presents an autonomous system using multi-rotor UAVs to explore plantation forest environments. The proposed method, including waypoint selection, trajectory generation, and trajectory following, is tested extensively in simulation and real flight testing, demonstrating its robust performance.
Modern plantation forest procedures still rely heavily on manual data acquisition in the inventory process, limiting the quantity and quality of the collected data. This limitation in collection performance is often due to the difficulty of traversing the plantation forest environment on foot. This work presents an autonomous system for exploring plantation forest environments using multi-rotor UAVs. The proposed method consists of three parts: waypoint selection, trajectory generation, and trajectory following. Waypoint selection is accomplished by estimating the rows' locations within the environment and selecting points between adjacent rows. Trajectory generation is completed using a non-linear optimization-based constant speed planner and the following is accomplished using a model predictive control approach. The proposed method is tested extensively in simulation against various procedurally generated forest environments, with results suggesting that it is robust against variations within the scene. Finally, flight testing is performed in a local plantation forest, demonstrating the successful application of our proposed method within a complex, uncontrolled environment.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available