Title
Real-Time Compact Environment Representation for UAV Navigation.
Abstract
Recently, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have attracted much attention due to their on-demand deployment, high mobility, and low cost. For UAVs navigating in an unknown environment, efficient environment representation is needed due to the storage limitation of the UAVs. Nonetheless, building an accurate and compact environment representation model is highly non-trivial because of the unknown shape of the obstacles and the time-consuming operations such as finding and eliminating the environmental details. To overcome these challenges, a novel vertical strip extraction algorithm is proposed to analyze the probability density function characteristics of the normalized disparity value and segment the obstacles through an adaptive size sliding window. In addition, a plane adjustment algorithm is proposed to represent the obstacle surfaces as polygonal prism profiles while minimizing the redundant obstacle information. By combining these two proposed algorithms, the depth sensor data can be converted into the multi-layer polygonal prism models in real time. Besides, a drone platform equipped with a depth sensor is developed to build the compact environment representation models in the real world. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves better performance in terms of precision and storage as compared to the baseline.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.3390/s20174976
Sensors
Keywords
DocType
Volume
compact environment representation,kernel density estimation,obstacle sensing,unmanned aerial vehicle
Journal
20
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
17
1424-8220
0
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.34
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Kaitao Meng152.45
Deshi Li232526.11
Xiaofan He300.34
Mingliu Liu401.35
Weitao Song503.04