Development of a Forest Inventory System by Multicopter Flying in Forest

The purpose of this study is to develop a forest inventory system using a multicopter flying in the forest. In order to achieve this purpose, it is necessary to realize collision avoidance with trees and to estimate the attribute of tree information by 3D shape mapping by Simultaneous Localization And Mapping(SLAM). The "Cartographer" SLAM system generates a 3D shape map. The thickness of the tree can be estimated based on the point cloud data obtained by the system. By extracting the point cloud data of each tree from the measurement data, and applying the proposed methodology to them, the trunk thickness has been estimated within +/- 2 cm error in 7 of the 8 trees.