Evaluation of 3d Uas Flight Path Planning Algorithms

Abstract

Abstract. The application of image-based methods in inspections and monitoring has increased significantly over recent years. This is especially the case for the inspection of large structures that are not easily accessible for human inspectors. Here, unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) can support by generating high-quality images, that contain valuable information about the structure’s condition. To guarantee high quality and completeness for the acquired data, inspection missions are planned in advance by computing a flight path for the UAS, that covers the entire structure with the required quality. Many approaches on this topic exist that aim to solve this planning task. Nevertheless, each publication on this matter mostly stands on its own, working with its own criteria and no comparison to other approaches. Therefore, it is currently not possible to compare different approaches and select the most suitable for a specific scenario. To solve this problem, this work proposes an evaluation pipeline that applies well defined quality criteria on flight paths for close-range image-based inspections. These criteria are limited to fundamental aspects for the evaluation of paths that were created for diverse scenarios with diverse criteria and still find common ground for comparison. As experiments show, this pipeline allows the comparison of different approaches, objectifying the performance and working towards a common understanding of the current state of the art. Finally, the Bauhaus Path Planning Challenge is presented, inviting submissions to a comparison based on this pipeline to collaborate on an objective ranking, available under https://uni-weimar.de/pathplanning.

A Review on Viewpoints and Path Planning for UAV-Based 3-D Reconstruction

“…Evaluation of viewpoints and path planning methods for UAV-based 3-D reconstruction is an important task which poses many significant challenges [19], [26], [169], [170]. First, the important criteria in various communities and projects are different.…”

“…Moreover, moving objects and modifications of the object itself that can occur over the course of time can affect the evaluations. Furthermore, ground truth information is typically not available [19], [26], [169]. Hence, in most studies, the evaluations of the real datasets and scenes are restricted to the qualitative verification.…”

“…However, since these metrics are a function of both viewpoints planning quality and 3-D reconstruction quality, these strategies cannot evaluate the viewpoints planning separately. The topic of establishing an evaluation pipeline and proper quality criteria is discussed in paper [169]. Based on the proposed pipeline, the authors evaluated some 3-D UAS flight path planning algorithms.…”

“…There are also some attempts to combine different quality metrics to provide a unified score for both viewpoints and path planning steps to make different approaches comparable. In [169] an evaluation pipeline is introduced which employs a normalized score for weighted combination of viewpoints and path planning quality as follows:…”

Potential-Guided Uav-Flight Path Planning for the Inspection of Complex Structures

“…In the literature, different methods are used, in many cases, for example in (Li et al, 2023, Zhou et al, 2023, Shang and Shen, 2022, the completeness and accuracy of the reconstructed scene are computed by simulating the reconstruction and comparing the result to the ground truth, the original model of the scene. In a previous work (Debus and Rodehorst, 2021), a unified evaluation metric for the assessment of flight paths was presented that considers coverage, resolution on the surface, and the accuracy of the 3D reconstruction, without simulating the acquisition and computing a reconstruction. The metric provides localized information about which regions are covered as well as a global score for the entire flight path.…”