Drone Trajectory Planning Based on Geographic Information System for 3D Urban Modeling

The widespread use of information and communications technologies enhanced urban infrastructure, thus enabling the emergence of smart cities. Among these technologies, drones can be useful to generate high-resolution 3D urban models to provide detailed information about the smart city structure. However, successfully using drones for 3D modeling of wide areas is challenging mainly because of their limited resources such as battery autonomy, onboard memory, and processing. Therefore, trajectory planning can improve resource utilization by reducing the search space during drone flight for modeling. We propose a comprehensive framework based on the geographic information system for drone trajectory planning. Compared to previous studies, we simultaneously apply trajectory and 3D modeling constraints using flight map information including visibility, wind and risk. We verify the effectiveness of the proposed approach on datasets from the South Korea Open Data.