Autonomous Aerial Mapping and its Applications for Emergency Response

Navigating unknown structures (e.g., buildings or caves) can be a dangerous and challenging task for emergency responders. This risk can be reduced by capturing detailed 3D maps of unseen environments with a robotic sensor platform and using them to assess and visualise the unknown structures. Many existing approaches require offline processing or human oversight to produce high-fidelity maps, which precludes their use in real-time scenarios with limited communication. This paper investigates the use of an autonomous aerial mapping solution that could capture detailed 3D maps of unknown structures in real-time without requiring human intervention.