Multi-Drone Cooperation for Improved LiDAR-Based Mapping

This paper focuses on mission planning and cooperative navigation algorithms for multi-drone systems aimed at LiDAR-based mapping. It aims at demonstrating how multi-UAV cooperation can be used to fulfill LiDAR data georeferencing accuracy requirements, as well as to improve data collection capabilities, e.g., increasing coverage per unit time and point cloud density. These goals are achieved by exploiting the CDGNSS/Vision paradigm and properly defining the formation geometry and the UAV trajectories. The paper provides analytical tools to estimate point density considering different types of scanning LIDAR and to define attitude/pointing requirements. These tools are then used to support centralized cooperation-aware mission planning aimed at complete coverage for different target geometries. The validity of the proposed framework is demonstrated through numerical simulations considering a formation of three vehicles tasked with a powerline inspection mission. The results show that cooperative navigation allows for the reduction of angular and positioning estimation uncertainties, which results in a georeferencing error reduction of an order of magnitude and equal to 16.7 cm in the considered case.