An Interactive Model-Driven Path Planning and Data Capture System for Camera-Equipped Aerial Robots on Construction Sites

Camera-equipped UAVs are rapidly emerging as ubiquitous tools for capturing images/videos for monitoring construction sites. Currently, professionals use 2D maps for producing flight plans. These maps often depict the state of sites prior to construction and mainly allow for planar grid patterns for capturing overlapping visual data. To enable 3D capture and control percentage overlap among captured visual data necessary for photogrammetry, professionals need to manually operate the UAVs, a process which is time-consuming and requires dexterity. In this paper, a new client- system is presented to enable 3D path planning and visual data collection. It exploits prior knowledge of the BIM and assesses flight path for safety and quality requirements. The system includes a web-based user interface to plan and simulate the UAV missions, and a mobile application to execute the flights. To verify the system, planned flight missions are simulated and compared to executed flights. Results show that the system can achieve safe and quality capture while accommodating requirements for image-based 3D reconstruction and project controls applications.