Resilient Terrain Navigation with a 5 DOF Metal Detector Drone (ICRA 2023)

Paper: Micro aerial vehicles (MAVs) hold the potential for performing autonomous and contactless land surveys for the detection of landmines and explosive remnants of war (ERW). Metal detectors are the standard detection tool but must be operated close to and parallel to the terrain. Combining MAVs and metal detectors has yet to be shown as this requires advanced flight capabilities. To this end, we present an autonomous system to survey challenging undulated terrain using a metal detector mounted on a 5 degrees of freedom (DOF) MAV. Based on an online estimate of the terrain, our receding-horizon planner efficiently covers the area, aligning the detector to the surface while considering the kinematic and visibility constraints of the platform. As the survey requires resilient and accurate localization in diverse terrain, we also propose a factor graph-based online fusion of GNSS, IMU, and LiDAR measurements. We validate that the solution is robust to individual sensor degeneracy by flying under the canopy of trees and over featureless fields. A simulated ablation study shows that the proposed planner reduces coverage duration and improves trajectory smoothness. Finally, real-world flight experiments showcase autonomous mapping of buried metallic objects in undulated and obstructed terrain. Patrick Pfreundschuh, Rik Bähnemann, Tim Kazik, Thomas Mantel, Roland Siegwart, Olov Andersson