LiDAR Based Navigable Region Detection for Unmanned Surface Vehicles

Xiangtong Yao, Yunxiao Shan, Jieling Li, Donghui Ma, Kai Huang

Abstract: Detection of the navigable regions for the unmanned surface vehicles (USVs) sailing on the narrow rivers is very important. Existing detection methods mostly depend on the cameras, which is sensitive to environments and cannot provide reliable navigable regions for sailing. In this paper, we propose a scheme to process 3D LiDAR data to achieve an accurate and robust navigable regions detection. We conduct field experiments in a narrow river in different scenarios to prove the performance of the proposed scheme, which reaches on average 93.8% precision and 92.7% recall.