3D Map Construction by Stereo Image Processing Using Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

In recent years, the performance of autonomous mobile robots including small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and the like has dramatically improved. For that reason, various environmental recognition technologies for autonomous mobile robots and others to recognize and act on the outside world have been studied. Therefore, environment recognition by only an image sensor which is inexpensive, lightweight and has a large amount of information has attracted attention. In this paper, we propose a system to recognize environment of flight path using only images obtained from stereo cameras attached to UAV, and propose an algorithm to generate three-dimensional (3D) map of flight path. As a result, it is possible to perform 3D map construction indoors or outdoors only with stereo images acquired from the stereo camera system mounted on UAV.