Low Cost Unmanned Aircraft-Based Lidar Scanning System

Project goal: To design a low-cost drone attachment capable of using lidar to create a sub-five centimeter resolution model of a selected area. This system easily mounts to an unmanned aircraft and,by programming a simple flight path, is capable of flying over a designated area to create a high-resolution 3-D model of the scanned area. The system uses three low-cost lidars scanning simultaneously while the unmanned aircraft is on autopilot slowly flying across a field. A custom-designed interface board allows microcontrollers to log the data from each lidar. An ultra-high-resolution GPS using real-time kinematics was selected to get a global positioning accuracy of less than one centimeter. Custom software running on a supercomputer was used to process the millions of data points collected and return a 3-D model of the scanned object with a final resolution accuracy of five centimeters or less.