Autonomous navigation in mountainous terrain or dense metropolitan centers suffers from severe line-of-sight blockage. This paper presents an aerial look-ahead perception system.
Testing autonomous vehicles accompanied by an overhead tethered drone revealed a 400% expansion in effective braking distance horizon during heavy rain.
Implementing octree-based spatial compression reduces raw 3D LiDAR streams from 1.2 Gbps down to 18 Mbps without sacrificing obstacle detection precision.