Indoor Testing and Simulation Platform for Close-distance Visual Inspection of Complex Structures using Micro Quadrotor UAV

04/10/2019
by   Zhexiong Shang, et al.
0

In recent years, using drone, also known as unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), in close-distance visual inspection has became an active area in many disciplines. However, many challenges still remain before we can achieve autonomous inspection, especially when inspecting complex structures. The complex civil structures, such as bridges, dams and wind turbines, are large-scale and geometrical complicated. It requires sophisticated path planning algorithms to achieve close-distance inspection and, at the same time, avoid collisions. In practice, directly deploying the path planning result on such structures is error prone, costly, and full of hazards. In this paper, rely on micro quadrotor UAV, the authors present an affordable experimental platform for testing drone-based path planning result. The platform allows the users to conduct many path planning experiments at any time without worrying expensive and time consuming outdoor test flying. This platform is developed based on the bundle of Crazyflie, which includes Crazyflie 2.0 quadrotor, Crazyradio and loco positioning system (LPS). Equipped with an onboard micro FPV camera, the visual data can be lively streamed to the host computer during flight. The functions of manual configuration and waypoints control are explicitly designed in this platform to increase its flexibility and performance on path following and debugging. To evaluate the practicability of the proposed test platform, two existing drone-based path planning algorithms are tested. The results show that even though certain level of error existed, the quality of visual data and accuracy of path following are high enough for simulating most practical inspection applications.

READ FULL TEXT

page 3

page 4

research
07/26/2020

Multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning for the Inspection of Large and Complex Structures

We present a multi-UAV Coverage Path Planning (CPP) framework for the in...
research
01/16/2019

Autonomous visual inspection of large-scale infrastructures using aerial robots

This article presents a novel framework for performing visual inspection...
research
12/12/2017

Generic Drone Control Platform for Autonomous Capture of Cinema Scenes

The movie industry has been using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as a new tool...
research
11/28/2017

Meteorology-Aware Multi-Goal Path Planning for Large-Scale Inspection Missions with Long-Endurance Solar-Powered Aircraft

Solar-powered aircraft promise significantly increased flight endurance ...
research
02/13/2020

A New Exocentric Metaphor for Complex Path Following to Control a UAV Using Mixed Reality

Teleoperation of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) has recently become an ...
research
06/20/2022

Developing a Free and Open-source Automated Building Exterior Crack Inspection Software for Construction and Facility Managers

Inspection of cracks is an important process for properly monitoring and...
research
09/03/2020

Evaluation of a Skill-based Control Architecture for a Visual Inspection-oriented Aerial Platform

The periodic inspection of vessels is a fundamental task to ensure their...

Please sign up or login with your details

Forgot password? Click here to reset