UAV Mapping with Semantic and Traversability Metrics for Forest Fire MitigationDownload PDF

Published: 03 Jun 2022, Last Modified: 23 May 2023IFRRIA OralReaders: Everyone
Keywords: UAV, Forestery, SLAM, Segmentation, Traversability
TL;DR: The design and evaluation of a UAV system for mapping a forest environment.
Abstract: The negative impacts of forest fires are dramatically increasing, which is driven by the effects of climate change and other factors. Robotics systems are one method to improve the feasibility of prevention and mitigation efforts. In this work we propose a unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that can map a region, for example so an unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) can autonomously clear fuel to prevent the spread of fire. We developed a multi-sensor payload consisting of cameras, LiDAR, and GPS with onboard processing. We also implement a SLAM system to understand the 3D structure of the environment, a semantics system to identify fuel and other features in the environment, and a traversablilty system which predicts which region a UGV can navigate. This approach provides a 3D map of the environment and georegistered maps describing the locations of fuel and traversable regions. We validate our system with preliminary field trials and show that this is a promising approach.
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