On the Advantages of Multiple Stereo Vision Camera Designs for Autonomous Drone Navigation
This work addresses navigation challenges for autonomous drones in inspection and mapping, but it appears incremental as it combines existing planning and mapping algorithms with a reconfigurable camera setup.
The paper tackled autonomous drone navigation by designing a multi-camera UAV system with receding horizon exploration for Next-Best-View planning, achieving improved mapping performance in inspection tasks, though specific numerical gains are not provided.
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.