MRI: Track 1 Acquisition of an Integrated LiDAR and Hyperspectral Sensing System for Robustly Mapping Physical Environments

This award supports the acquisition of a new sensing system consisting of sensors and a hexacopter drone for the KnightSight project at the University of Central Florida (UCF). The goal is to capture and integrate data, both visible and invisible to the human eye, using this new sensing system. This sensing system will be mounted on flying drones, robots, and ground vehicles, enabling KnightSight to gather information in both indoor and outdoor environments. The rapid collection of these visible and invisible datasets will allow researchers to monitor and analyze structural and environmental changes over time. The new sensing system will consist of co-aligned LiDAR and hyperspectral imaging sensors, a fluorescence spectrometer, an autonomous laser scanning unit, and aerial and ground plaforms. This instrument will enable numerous new research activities by affording advanced sensing capabilities and robust datasets for numerous domains and areas, including computer science, civil and environmental engineering, materials science, and marine biology. The project will specifically advance knowledge about how to visualize and best use co-aligned LiDAR and hyperspectral data and how to optimize the associated large datasets for public access and use. This project has the potential to benefit society in several ways, including reducing energy consumption through advanced building energy simulations, preserving the country’s civil infrastructure through structural health monitoring, improving coastal flood and erosion risk models, providing evidence of how sea-level changes are impacting marine wildlife, and improving solar panel designs. This project will directly benefit undergraduate researchers who will receive research training on how to use the instrument and process the resulting datasets. The datasets captured during the project will be optimized and made publicly available. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.