| Description: | Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are expanding from open outdoor environments into more constrained indoor locations thanks to improvements in accuracy and precision of localization, navigation and control algorithms in recent years. New possibilities for deployment of autonomous UAV swarms into indoor environments emerge, leading to the development of high-level mission-oriented algorithms. Our team is in particular interested in mapping and documenting of historic buildings to assess the condition of the ceiling, murals, statues, stained glass, etc. The historics and restorers need high-quality detailed images to evaluate the unreachable parts of the buildings for which the UAV is the ideal platform that saves money and time that would otherwise be spent on building scaffoldings to reach the areas of interest.
The goal of this project is to develop a technique for documenting the UAV interior using a team of UAVs equipped with cameras. The high quality and resolution of the images will be achieved by stitching multiple close-up images taken by all members of the UAV team. Assuming the approximate positions of the UAVs are known, the camera images taken from a close vicinity of the documented object can be stitched together into a large and detailed image by matching image features. The optimal trajectory for all members of the team has to be planned so that the whole documented object is captured with sufficient overlap between the images to allow stitching into a high-resolution composite image. The time spent on capturing the images has to be minimized since the flight time of the UAVs is constrained by their battery capacity. |
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