Autonomous exploration motion planning method for UAV with controllable LiDAR tilt angle

To address the issue of low efficiency in large-scale scenario exploration for Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) equipped with fixed-tilt angle Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), an autonomous exploration motion planning method for UAV with controllable LiDAR tilt angle is proposed. First, the method generates viewpoints containing desired LiDAR tilt angle. Then, it performs path planning using the viewpoints information. In the viewpoint generation stage, firstly, viewpoints positions are generated based on frontier normal vector to reduce computational time. Subsequently, the corresponding LiDAR tilt angle is calculated according to the relative position between the frontier and the viewpoints, so as to increase the number of observable frontier voxels from viewpoints. When getting the viewpoint access sequence in the global path planning stage, an equivalent viewpoints method is employed to coordinate adjustments of the LiDAR tilt angle and the UAV yaw angle, thereby reducing the time cost of UAV movement between viewpoints. Simulation results show that, compared to the Fast UAV Exploration (FUEL) method, the proposed method reduces the average exploration time and path length by approximately 10% in a typical factory scenario. In a multi-story structured mall scenario, it achieves a reduction of over 20% in average exploration time and over 10% in average exploration path length.