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Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly known as drones, have proved to be highly effective systems for monitoring and exploring environments. These autonomous flying robots could also be used to create detailed maps and three-dimensional (3D) visualizations of real-world environments.

Researchers at Sun Yat-Sen University and the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology recently introduced SOAR, a system that allows a team of UAVs to rapidly and autonomously reconstruct environments by simultaneously exploring and photographing them. This system, introduced in a paper published on the arXiv preprint server and set to be presented at the IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) 2024, could have numerous applications, ranging from the urban planning to the design of videogame environments.

"Our paper stemmed from the increasing need for efficient and high-quality 3D reconstruction using UAVs," Mingjie Zhang, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

"We observed that existing methods often fell into two categories: model-based approaches, which can be time-consuming and expensive due to their reliance on prior information, and model-free methods, which explore and reconstruct simultaneously but might be limited by local planning constraints. Our goal was to bridge this gap by developing a system that could leverage the strengths of both approaches."

Credit: Zhang et al.

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