DEVELOPMENT AND ANALYSE VISUAL NAVIGATION SYSTEM FOR AIR AND GROUND-BASED ROBOTS
Valentin Noskov, Y. S. Barichev, O.P. Goydin, A. N. Kuryanov · Известия Южного федерального университета. Технические науки · 2025
The work is devoted to solving urgent problems of joint autonomous visual navigation for air andground-based robots in urbanized environments. These environments are highly demanded for specialoperations, including dense urban areas and buildings, where the use of traditional remote control devicesis limited due to the presence of shielded areas. The proposed solution addresses group navigation tasksbased on data from onboard vision systems during operational reconnaissance of the working area by anunmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The results of this reconnaissance enable autonomous movement andflight, both for individual heterogeneous robotic systems and for groups.The navigation algorithms arebased on methods for extracting a horizontal reference surface and horizontal sections of the externalenvironment from a volumetric point cloud generated by an onboard lidar. These methods allow for theprecise and rapid determination of all six coordinates of the control object. Cases where the navigationtask cannot be fully solved due to specific environmental characteristics are also considered. To address these challenges, methods are proposed to enhance lidar rangefinding data by integrating video cameradata. An accuracy assessment of the video navigation solutions is provided, obtained through mathematicalmodeling of the external environment and the generation of video data. To ensure safe autonomousflight and movement of robotic systems in urban environments, methods for reducing video navigationerrors are proposed. These methods utilize a specially designed bank of reference images with knowncoordinates of their formation. The effectiveness of the applied methods and the proposed video navigationalgorithms is confirmed by experimental studies of the corresponding software and hardware in realurbanized environments