Kern, Alexander (TU Braunschweig), Bobbe, Markus (TU Braunschweig), Khedar, Yogesh (Technical University of Braunschweig), Bestmann, Ulf (Technical University Braunschweig)

OpenREALM: Real-Time Mapping for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Scheduled for presentation during the Regular Session "UAS Applications II" (ThB3), Thursday, September 3, 2020, 16:00−16:20, Edessa

2020 International Conference on Unmanned Aircraft Systems (ICUAS), September 1-4, 2020 (Postponed from June 9-12, 2020), Athens, Greece

This information is tentative and subject to change. Compiled on April 18, 2024

Abstract

This paper presents OpenREALM, a real-time mapping framework for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). A camera attached to the onboard computer of a moving UAV is utilized to acquire high resolution image mosaics of a targeted area of interest. Different modes of operation allow OpenREALM to perform simple stitching assuming an approximate plane ground, or to fully recover complex 3D surface information to extract both elevation maps and geometrically corrected orthophotos. Additionally, the global position of the UAV is used to georeference the data. In all modes incremental progress of the resulting map can be viewed live by an operator on the ground. Obtained, up-todate surface information will be a push forward to a variety of UAV applications. For the benefit of the community, source code is public at https://github.com/laxnpander/OpenREALM.