Control and Optimization of UAV Trajectory for Aerial Coverage in Photogrammetry Applications

Abstract

Photogrammetry is a well-studied and much-used analysis tool. Typical use cases include area surveillance, flood monitoring and related tasks. Usually, an Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) is used as support for image acquisition from an a priori delimited region in a semi-automated manner (via a mix of ground control and autonomous trajectory tracking). This in turn has led to various algorithms which handle path trajectory generation under realistic constraints but still many avenues remain open. In this paper, we consider typical costs and constraints (UAS dynamics, total-path length, line inter-distance, turn points, etc.) in order to obtain, via optimization procedures, an optimal trajectory. To this end we make use of polyhedral set operations, flat trajectory generation and other similar tools. Additional work includes the study of non-convex regions and estimation of the number of photographs taken via Ehrhart polynomial computations.

Keywords

• digital photography
• optimization
• path planning
• position control
• unmanned aerial vehicles