Autonomous UAV Mapping and BIM-Integrated Construction Monitoring

Autonomous UAV Mapping and BIM-Integrated Construction Monitoring

Currently open to new students?

Yes
No

Description

This project aims to develop an autonomous UAV system for mapping, inspection, and progress monitoring in complex underground construction environments.
Our focus is on integrating autonomous flight, multi-modal perception, semantic mapping, BIM-guided planning, and 3D reconstruction into a real-world drone system.
Students may work on topics including:
  • LiDAR-, camera-, and depth-sensor integration
  • SLAM and localization in GPS-denied environments
  • Autonomous 3D coverage and inspection planning
  • BIM-guided trajectory and viewpoint planning
  • Open-vocabulary semantic segmentation and semantic mapping

Skills Desired

Required
  • Strong programming, communication, collaboration, organization, and planning
  • Proactive and fast self-learner
  • Interest in robotics, autonomous systems, computer vision, 3D perception, or aerial robotics
Bonus
  • Familiarity with software: ROS2, Python, C++, Linux, Bash, Git, docker
  • Familiarity with semantic segmentation or foundation / open-vocabulary vision models
  • Experience with drone or mobile-robot autonomy
  • Experience with trajectory planning or coverage planning

Student Learning Objectives

  • Understand the complete autonomy stack of a real UAV system
  • Work with synchronized LiDAR, RGB, depth, and onboard-computing systems
  • Develop and evaluate SLAM and mapping algorithms for GPS-denied environments
  • Design autonomous 3D inspection and coverage-planning algorithms
  • Working with senior students and faculty advisors

Classes Accepted into Project

Junior
Senior
Graduate Student
Not a hard limit. We care more about talent and potential.

Compensation

Units 9
Units 12
Pay

Contact

Eungchang Mason Lee  eungchal@andrew.cmu.edu Sebastian Scherer  basti@andrew.cmu.edu