Disaster Reconnaissance Using Multiple Small Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

Small rotorcraft unmanned air vehicles (sUAVs) are valuable tools in solving geospatial inspection challenges. One area where this is being widely explored is disaster reconnaissance [1]. Using sUAVs to collect images provides engineers and government officials critical information about the conditions before and after a disaster [2]. This is accomplished by creating high- fidelity 3D models from the sUAV’s imagery. However, using an sUAV to perform inspections is a challenging task due to constraints on the vehicle’s flight time, computational power, and data storage capabilities [3]. The approach presented in this article illustrates a method for utilizing multiple sUAVs to inspect a disaster region and merge the separate data into a single high-resolution 3D model.