Real-Time UAV Path Planning for Autonomous Urban Scene Reconstruction

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are frequently used for large-scale scene mapping and reconstruction. However, in most cases, drones are operated manually, which should be more effective and intelligent. In this article, we present a method of real-time UAV path planning for autonomous urban scene reconstruction. Considering the obstacles and time costs, we utilize the top view to generate the initial path. Then we estimate the building heights and take close-up pictures that reveal building details through a SLAM framework. To predict the coverage of the scene, we propose a novel method which combines information on reconstructed point clouds and possible coverage areas. The experimental results reveal that the reconstruction quality of our method is good enough. Our method is also more time-saving than the state-of-the-arts.