On the Advantages of Multiple Stereo Vision Camera Designs for Autonomous Drone Navigation

TL;DR

This paper evaluates a reconfigurable multi-stereo camera system on a drone, demonstrating how multiple cameras enhance autonomous navigation, exploration, and mapping performance using advanced planning algorithms.

Contribution

It introduces a multi-camera UAV design coupled with state-of-the-art planning algorithms, analyzing the benefits and trade-offs of multiple stereo cameras for autonomous drone navigation.

Findings

Multi-camera system improves exploration efficiency

Trade-offs identified between number of cameras and mapping quality

System successfully applied in autonomous inspection tasks

Abstract

In this work we showcase the design and assessment of the performance of a multi-camera UAV, when coupled with state-of-the-art planning and mapping algorithms for autonomous navigation. The system leverages state-of-the-art receding horizon exploration techniques for Next-Best-View (NBV) planning with 3D and semantic information, provided by a reconfigurable multi stereo camera system. We employ our approaches in an autonomous drone-based inspection task and evaluate them in an autonomous exploration and mapping scenario. We discuss the advantages and limitations of using multi stereo camera flying systems, and the trade-off between number of cameras and mapping performance.