MODEL-BASED MULTI-UAV PATH PLANNING FOR HIGH-QUALITY 3D RECONSTRUCTION OF BUILDINGS

Abstract. Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) photogrammetry is widely used for acquiring high-quality 3D models of urban areas. However, the completeness and quality of the reconstructed model can be affected by complex or concave structures when using common flight paths. Furthermore, flight paths with multi-altitude and multi-attitude waypoints can be time-consuming and may not be efficiently implemented by a single drone. To address these challenges, we propose a model-based multi-UAV path planning method for capturing images that enable complete and precise 3D reconstruction of buildings. Our method analyzes the geometry of the input coarse model and plans viewpoints based on the reconstructability related to completeness and precision. By solving a multiple travelling salesmen problem (mTSP), individual flight paths for each UAV are generated. We conducted a real-world experiment comparing the performance and efficiency of the proposed method with two existing solutions. Results the proposed method produces a more complete 3D reconstruction with fewer images compared to the existing methods. It also shows that using two UAVs with the proposed method can significantly reduce the overall time required for 3D reconstruction.