BIM-Aided Scanning Path Planning for Autonomous Surveillance UAVs with LiDAR
Changhao Song, Kai Wang, Jack C.P. Cheng · Proceedings of the ... ISARC · 2020
An Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), equipped with a Light Detection And Ranging (LiDAR) scanner, can collect high-accuracy point cloud data of facilities in cluttered indoor environment.Recent developments in aerial robotics have demonstrated navigation through designated waypoints, yet little has been investigated on the trajectory to complete a full scan of the environment.This study develops an automated approach to integrate scan planning and trajectory generation of a LiDAR-carrying UAV.The proposed approach converts an as-designed Building Information Model (BIM) into an occupancy map, where a set of waypoints are generated with a greedy algorithm.The shortest collision-free path to traverse all the waypoints is computed with the A* algorithm and Genetic Algorithm (GA).After that, the straight-line segments are transformed into a minimum snap trajectory formed of piecewise polynomials.The planned trajectory is validated with both a MATLAB numerical solver and a Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) simulation in the Unreal Engine 4.