Dronument: System for Reliable Deployment of Micro Aerial Vehicles in Dark Areas of Large Historical Monuments

Abstract

This letter presents a self-contained system for robust deployment of autonomous aerial vehicles in environments without access to global navigation systems and with limited lighting conditions. The proposed system, application-tailored for documentation in dark areas of large historical monuments, uses a unique and reliable aerial platform with a multi-modal lightweight sensory setup to acquire data in human-restricted areas with adverse lighting conditions, especially in areas that are high above the ground. The introduced localization method relies on an easy-to-obtain 3-D point cloud of a historical building, while it copes with a lack of visible light by fusing active laserbased sensors. The approach does not rely on any external localization, or on a preset motion-capture system. This enables fast deployment in the interiors of investigated structures while being computationally undemanding enough to process data online, onboard an MAV equipped with ordinary processing resources.The reliability of the system is analyzed, is quantitatively evaluated on a set of aerial trajectories performed inside a realworld church, and is deployed onto the aerial platform in the position control feedback loop to demonstrate the reliability of the system in the safety-critical application of historical monuments documentation.

An autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle system for fast exploration of large complex indoor environments

“…More robust methods with respect to lighting conditions use active laser sensors (LIDARs) as the primary source for ego-motion estimation. Laser-inertial SLAM (LI-SLAM) may employ various types of laser sensors, ranging from 2D methods (Petrlík et al, 2020) and 3D methods utilizing 2D LIDAR (Petráček et al, 2020) to approaches utilizing comparably heavyweight 3D sensors (Geneva et al, 2018;Nieuwenhuisen et al, 2017;Ye et al, 2019;Zhang & Singh, 2014).…”

Autonomous Execution of Cinematographic Shots With Multiple Drones

“…Autonomous systems with multiple drones: Regarding the use of multiples drones, some applications related to cinematography are worth mentioning. For instance, the authors in [27] propose a multi-drone system for documentation of historical buildings. While one of the drones is taking pictures, the others maintain a formation to illuminate the scene adequately.…”

Safe Documentation of Historical Monuments by an Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

“…Efficient technological assistance may provide autonomous aerial robots, which are capable of documentation and monitoring in areas that are not easily accessible by humans without building scaffolding or a high lift platform. For this purpose, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have emerged into the field of documentation of historical structures' interiors [13]. In comparison with taking photographs from the ground, the UAVs offer fast and efficient documentation of interiors' surfaces from appropriate angles, offer a seamless assessment of structural integrity of the buildings, allow periodic inspection under temporal as well as spatial constraints, and provide repeatable and precise data acquisition with arbitrary sensory equipment mounted onboard.…”

“…These commercial UAVs are unable to carry additional payload or seamlessly interchange onboard sensory equipment and are limited to single-drone deployments only. In contrast, systems such as [13], previously proposed by our group, tackle all these challenges and provide frameworks for multi-robot deployments. Uses of such multi-robot deployments in high interior areas began to emerge in recent years, starting from dynamic scene-lighting [14] and going to effective and autonomous Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) [15].…”

“…Based on our preliminary works [13,15], the main contribution we propose in this manuscript is a final autonomous aerial robotic platform (and its tightly coupled software stack) that is able to perform interior and exterior documentation of heritage sites, which includes an automatic methodology for aerial data acquisition, data post-processing, data visualization, and the availability of data distribution among the roboticists as well as the heritage sector. The aerial system, which is presented here, was already deployed in several historical objects within the Czech Republic and Poland in order to document interior furnishings, and exterior facades and roofs.…”