3D LiDAR Sensor Characterization for Obstacle Detection in Autonomous UAS Applications

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS), more commonly known as drones, are a new and promising air transportation alternative, which is being utilized in various civil, scientific, and military applications. Thanks to versatility, flexibility and ability of reuse, UAS-based missions operate in several contexts such as search and rescue, disaster assessment, urban traffic monitoring, power line inspection, agriculture crop monitoring and spraying, and in all environments that could be extremely dangerous or impossible for human action. The use of UASs is constantly increasing also within urban areas, where high-level operational safety is required. To ensure safety of autonomous UAS flight operations, Detect and Avoid (DAA) systems are crucial. DAA technology consists of methods for other aircraft or obstacle individuation and identification of safe paths within the mission scenario. This paper focuses on the characterization of a 3D rotary LiDAR (RS-LiDAR-16 by RoboSense), widely used in SLAM (Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) applications. The potentiality of the sensor of usage in obstacle detection system for UAS operations, especially during missions conducted in full autonomy or Beyond Visual Line of Sight (B-VLOS), are explored, due to the Lidar's possibility to provide realtime 3-D point clouds of the environment up to 30-m range.