Development of LiDAR-Based UAV System for Environment Reconstruction

In disaster management, reconstructing the environment and quickly collecting the geospatial data of the impacted areas in a short time are crucial. In this letter, a light detection and ranging (LiDAR)-based unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is proposed to complete the reconstruction task. The UAV integrate an inertial navigation system (INS), a global navigation satellite system (GNSS) receiver, and a low-cost LiDAR. An unmanned helicopter is introduced and the multisensor payload architecture for direct georeferencing is designed to improve the capabilities of the vehicle. In addition, a new strategy of iterative closest point algorithm is proposed to solve the registration problems in the sparse and inhomogeneous derived point cloud. The proposed registration algorithm addresses the local minima problem by the use of direct-georeferenced points and the novel hierarchical structure as well as taking the feedback bias into INS/GNSS. The generated point cloud is compared with a more accurate one derived from a high-grade terrestrial LiDAR which uses real flight data. Results indicate that the proposed UAV system achieves meter-level accuracy and reconstructs the environment with dense point cloud.