Research of environment recognition based on cooperation of multiple drones

Abstract

Recently, drone technology has developed rapidly, expected to play an active part in various fields. Especially, in the field of surveying and life saving, the usefulness in the ocean and the beach is high, and systemization about environmental recognition at the sea is regarded as important. The depth investigation of coastal area is one of important topographic surveys in the beach environment and coastal topography changes frequently due to unexpected events such as typhoons and other seasonal fluctuations in waves, flows, weather fields, so this investigation is required to improve efficiency. This paper proposes a new water depth estimation method of coastal area using cooperation of UAV and USV. Detecting the water depth USV from the UAV overhead view image, detecting the seabed landmark from the USV underwater image, and applying the triangulation method to estimate the water depth distance. Experimental results have shown the effective of the proposed method.