New Era in Cultural Heritage Preservation: Cooperative Aerial Autonomy for Fast Digitalization of Difficult-to-Access Interiors of Historical Monuments

Digital documentation of large interiors of historical buildings is an exhausting task as most of the areas of interest are beyond typical human reach. We advocate the use of fully autonomous teams of cooperating multirotor UAVs to speed up the documentation process by several orders of magnitude while allowing for a repeatable, accurate, and condition-independent solution capable of precise, collision-free operation at great heights. In particular, we present a universal autonomy for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) cooperating aerially within a team while documenting the interiors of historical buildings for the purposes of restoration planning and documentation works as well as for assessing the structural state of aging historical sites. We show that the proposed approach of active multirobot cooperation enables performing documentation tasks requiring dynamic scene illumination in large-scale real-world scenarios, a process previously applicable only manually in areas easily accessible by humans.