UAV-MapFusion: RTK-Aligned Uncertainty-Aware Coarse-to-Fine Multi-Session UAV Mapping

Feng Pan, Chunran Zheng, Bing Xue, Yukang Cui, Jiayu Wen, Zhiyu Chen, Wei Wang

Large-scale point cloud maps are essential for robotics and spatial intelligence tasks. UAVs provide an efficient means for large-scale map acquisition; however, due to limited flight endurance and onboard storage, mapping a large-scale scene within a single flight remains difficult. Existing multi-session map merging methods can extend the mapping range, yet in UAV scenarios they still struggle to simultaneously suppress long-range drift and preserve local geometric accuracy. To address this issue, an uncertainty-aware multi-session point cloud map merging and coarse-to-fine optimization system is proposed. The proposed method first performs initial multi-session map merging based on a scene graph, and then incorporates RTK observations through an RTK spatiotemporal alignment module, where temporal offsets are estimated using Dynamic Time Warping (DTW), and continuous RTK constraints are recovered using Multi-Output Gaussian Processes (MOGP) under incomplete sampling and frame dropouts. On this basis, a unified uncertainty-aware factor graph is constructed, and local geometric accuracy is further improved through iterative plane-factor refinement. Experiments on real-world datasets validate the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed method. To facilitate further research and development in the community, our code and dataset will be publicly released.