Unmanned aerial vehicles represent a new frontier in a wide range of monitoring and research applications. To fully leverage their potential, a key challenge is planning missions for efficient data acquisition in complex environments. To address this issue, this article introduces a general informative path planning framework for monitoring scenarios using an aerial robot, focusing on problems in which the value of sensor information is unevenly distributed in a target area and unknown a priori. The approach is capable of learning and focusing on regions of interest via adaptation to map either discrete or continuous variables on the terrain using variable-resolution data received from probabilistic sensors. During a mission, the terrain maps built online are used to plan information-rich trajectories in continuous 3-D space by optimizing initial solutions obtained by a coarse grid search. Extensive simulations show that our approach is more efficient than existing methods. We also demonstrate its real-time application on a photorealistic mapping scenario using a publicly available dataset and a proof of concept for an agricultural monitoring task.

In this paper, we present a probabilistic framework to recover the extrinsic calibration parameters of a lidar-IMU sensing system. Unlike global-shutter cameras, lidars do not take single snapshots of the environment. Instead, lidars collect a succession of 3D-points generally grouped in scans. If these points are assumed to be expressed in a common frame, this becomes an issue when the sensor moves rapidly in the environment causing motion distortion. The fundamental idea of our proposed framework is to use preintegration over interpolated inertial measurements to characterise the motion distortion in each lidar scan. Moreover, by using a set of planes as a calibration target, the proposed method makes use of lidar point-to-plane distances to jointly calibrate and localise the system using on-manifold optimisation. The calibration does not rely on a predefined target as arbitrary planes are detected and modelled in the first lidar scan. Simulated and real data are used to show the effectiveness of the proposed method.

In this article, we present inertial lidar localization autocalibration and mapping: an offline probabilistic framework for localization, mapping, and extrinsic calibration based on a 3-D lidar and a six-degree-of-freedom inertial measurement unit. Most of today’s lidars collect geometric information about the surrounding environment by sweeping lasers across their field of view. Consequently, 3-D points in one lidar scan are acquired at different timestamps. If the sensor trajectory is not accurately known, the scans are affected by the phenomenon known as motion distortion. The proposed method leverages preintegration with a continuous representation of the inertial measurements to characterize the system’s motion at any point in time. It enables precise correction of the motion distortion without relying on any explicit motion model. The system’s pose, velocity, biases, and time shift are estimated via a full batch optimization that includes automatically generated loop closure constraints. The autocalibration and the registration of lidar data rely on planar and edge features matched across pairs of scans. The performance of the framework is validated through simulated and real-data experiments.

This paper explores the possibilities of using monocular simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) algorithms in systems with more than one camera. The idea is to combine in a single system the advantages of both monocular vision (bearings-only, infinite range observations but no 3-D instantaneous information) and stereovision (3-D information up to a limited range). Such a system should be able to instantaneously map nearby objects while still considering the bearing information provided by the observation of remote ones. We do this by considering each camera as an independent sensor rather than the entire set as a monolithic supersensor. The visual data are treated by monocular methods and fused by the SLAM filter. Several advantages naturally arise as interesting possibilities, such as the desynchronization of the firing of the sensors, the use of several unequal cameras, self-calibration, and cooperative SLAM with several independently moving cameras. We validate the approach with two different applications: a stereovision SLAM system with automatic self-calibration of the rig's main extrinsic parameters and a cooperative SLAM system with two independent free-moving cameras in an outdoor setting.