ENVIRONMENT SURVEYING USING A UAV

In the last few years, unmanned aerial vehicles have been increasingly used in challenging applications, including monitoring of environment, agriculture, mitigation actions in disaster sites, surveying of dam, inspection of wind turbines, power lines, pipelines ecc. An important part of the UAV sensor suite is represented by optical sensors, including radar and visual camera whereby the vehicle can perceive the surrounding environment under inspection and perform tasks such as mapping, 3D reconstruction and path planning. In this thesis, first the accurate modeling of visual sensors is discussed. Then, a simulator is built in Matlab environment that reproduces the synthetic output of a visual camera transported onboard a UAV. The simulator allows the user to select different trajectories and environment under inspection. Output from the simulator are the synthetic images as obtained by the camera during operations. This study allows to understand the influence of camera technical details to definethe best camera setup for the specific application. Real camera models available on the market are also considered and compared. Special focus has been given to the realistic rendering of the environment to make possible the operations of mosaicing. Simulation results are included to validate the proposed approach.