Field Evaluation of UAV Autonomous Driving Using 3D LiDAR SLAM in GPS-denied Agricultural Environments

Autonomous driving is essential for the automation of agricultural systems, and current research primarily relies on using global positioning system (GPS) signals. However, in environments where GPS signals are unstable or denied, such as canopies and smart farms, GPS-based autonomous driving systems face limitations. Therefore, this study proposes an unmanned aerial vehicle autonomous driving system using three-dimensional light detection and ranging simultaneous localization and mapping (3D LiDAR SLAM). The proposed algorithm follows three steps: (1) A map is generated using 3D LiDAR. Because it targets an environment with height restrictions, lightweight and ground-optimized LiDAR odometry and mapping (LeGO-LOAM), which has the characteristic of extracting the ground, is used as a 3D LiDAR SLAM algorithm. (2) Noise is removed through post-processing. (3) A path is generated using the A* algorithm. To evaluate the performance of the proposed system, field evaluations were conducted in an outdoor canopy orchard using GPS and real time kinematic (RTK) GPS data as references. The experimental results verified the limitations of existing GPS- and RTK GPS-based methods and demonstrated the good performance and effectiveness of autonomous driving using 3D LiDAR SLAM. These findings suggest the feasibility of automated operations in environments where GPS is unstable or denied, and efficient agricultural automation may be achieved in conjunction with future harvesting and pollination operations.