Flight Path Generation of Engine-driven Multicopter for Forest Inventory

Abstract

This study aims to generate forest 3D point cloud maps that provide useful information for forestry operations using a laser scanner mounted on a forest survey multicopter. To achieve this, it is necessary to generate basic flight paths flown by the multicopter, generate routes to avoid trees and other obstacles, and search for waypoints to extend the area that can be measured by LiDAR. In this paper, algorithms for these tasks are proposed. These algorithms are essential for the multicopter to scan the target forest while flying over it. The effectiveness of the proposed method is demonstrated by numerical simulations.