The task of establishing and maintaining situational awareness in an unknown environment is a critical step to fulfil in a mission related to the field of rescue robotics. Predominantly, the problem of visual inspection of urban structures is dealt with view-planning being addressed by map-based approaches. In this article, we propose a novel approach towards effective use of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) for obtaining a 3-D shape of an unknown structure of objects utilizing a map-independent planning framework. The problem is undertaken via a bifurcated approach to address the task of executing a closer inspection of detected structures with a wider exploration strategy to identify and locate nearby structures, while being equipped with limited sensing capability. The proposed framework is evaluated experimentally in a controlled indoor environment in presence of a mock-up environment validating the efficacy of the proposed inspect-explore policy.
University of Seville（塞维利亚大学）；Czech Technical University in Prague（捷克技术大学布拉格分校）
A software architecture aimed at coordinating a team of heterogeneous aerial vehicles for inspection and maintenance operations in high-voltage power line scenarios is presented in this paper. A hierarchical approach deals with high-level tasks by planning and executing complex missions requiring vehicles to support human operators. A resource-constrained problem allows distributing tasks among the team taking into account vehicles' capabilities and battery constraints. Besides, Behavior Trees (BTs) are in charge of mission execution, triggering replanning operations in case of unforeseen even…
MIRA-PRM: Mission-Informed Reusable Roadmap Planning for Mobile Gas-Sensing Inspection
Aerospace Information Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院空天信息创新研究院）；University of Chinese Academy of Sciences（中国科学院大学）；Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Nanjing Normal University（南京师范大学）；North University of China（中北大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）；Universiti Malaysia Perlis（马来西亚玻璃市大学）
Solar-powered aircraft promise significantly increased flight endurance over conventional aircraft. While this makes them promising candidates for large-scale aerial inspection missions, their structural fragility necessitates that adverse weather is avoided using appropriate path planning methods. This paper therefore presents MetPASS, the Meteorology-aware Path Planning and Analysis Software for Solar-powered UAVs. MetPASS is the first path planning framework in the literature that considers all aspects that influence the safety or performance of solar-powered flight: It avoids environmental…
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；Universidade Federal da Paraiba（帕拉伊巴联邦大学）；University of Seville（塞维利亚大学）
This paper presents a multi-layer software architecture to perform cooperative missions with a fleet of quadrotors providing support in electrical power line inspection operations. The proposed software framework guarantees the compliance with safety requirements between drones and human workers while ensuring that the mission is carried out successfully. Besides, cognitive capabilities are integrated in the multi-vehicle system in order to reply to unforeseen events and external disturbances. The feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed architecture are demonstrated by means of realistic…
AutoInspect: Towards Long-Term Autonomous Industrial Inspection
Oxford Robotics Institute, University of Oxford（牛津大学机器人研究所）；Remote Applications in Challenging Environments (RACE), United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority（英国原子能局远程应用在恶劣环境中（RACE））
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克理工大学）；ENEA（意大利国家新技术、能源与可持续经济发展署）
A framework for computing feasible and constrained trajectories for a fleet of quad-rotors leveraging on Signal Temporal Logic (STL) specifications for power line inspection tasks is proposed in this paper. The planner allows the formulation of complex missions that avoid obstacles and maintain a safe distance between drones while performing the planned mission. An optimization problem is set to generate optimal strategies that satisfy these specifications and also take vehicle constraints into account. Further, an event-triggered replanner is proposed to reply to unforeseen events and externa…
A Signal Temporal Logic Approach for Task-Based Coordination of Multi-Aerial Systems: a Wind Turbine Inspection Case Study
Ricerca sul Sistema Energetico (RSE) S.p.A.（意大利能源系统研究公司（RSE股份公司））；University of Seville（塞维利亚大学）；Italian National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development (ENEA)（意大利新技术、能源与可持续经济发展局）；University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学）
Within this paper, the problem of 3D structural inspection path planning for distributed infrastructure using aerial robots that are subject to time constraints is addressed. The proposed algorithm handles varying spatial properties of the infrastructure facilities, accounts for their different importance and exploration function and computes an overall inspection path of high inspection reward while respecting the robot endurance or mission time constraints as well as the vehicle dynamics and sensor limitations. To achieve its goal, it employs an iterative, 3-step optimization strategy at eac…
Aerial Inspection Behaviors via RL-based Quadrotor Control for Under-canopy Forest Environments
Robotics and AI group, in the Department of Computer Science, Electrical and Space Engineering at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden（鲁尔坎大学技术学院机器人与人工智能小组，计算机科学、电气与空间工程系，瑞典）
From Novice to Skilled: RL-based Shared Autonomy Communicating with Pilots in UAV Multi-Task Missions
Institute for Clarity in Documentation（文献清晰度研究所）；The Thørväld Group（索瓦尔德集团）；Inria Paris-Rocquencourt（法国国家信息与自动化研究所巴黎-罗康校区）；Rajiv Gandhi University（拉吉夫·甘地大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Palmer Research Laboratories（帕尔默研究实验室）；The Kumquat Consortium（金桔联盟）
UAS-based Automated Structural Inspection Path Planning via Visual Data Analytics and Optimization
University of Illinois Urbana Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；Zhejiang University - University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign Institute（浙江大学伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳香槟校区联合学院）
Task Coordination and Trajectory Optimization for Multi-Aerial Systems via Signal Temporal Logic: A Wind Turbine Inspection Study
Czech Technical University in Prague（布拉格捷克技术大学）；University of Seville（塞维利亚大学）；University of Sannio in Benevento（贝内文托萨尼奥大学）；ENEA（意大利国家新技术、能源与经济可持续发展局）；University of Zagreb（萨格勒布大学）
This article presents a novel framework for performing visual inspection around 3D infrastructures, by establishing a team of fully autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) with robust localization, planning and perception capabilities. The proposed aerial inspection system reaches high level of autonomy on a large scale, while pushing to the boundaries the real life deployment of aerial robotics. In the presented approach, the MAVs deployed for the inspection of the structure rely only on their onboard computer and sensory systems. The developed framework envisions a modular system, combining …
dLITE: Differentiable Lighting-Informed Trajectory Evaluation for On-Orbit Inspection
Australian Centre for Robotics（澳大利亚机器人中心）；School of Aerospace, Mechanical and Mechatronic Engineering, The University of Sydney（航空航天、机械与机电工程学院，悉尼大学）；Asset Management Hub (ARIAM), The University of Sydney（资产管理工作中心（ARIAM），悉尼大学）
REACT: Real-time Entanglement-Aware Coverage Path Planning for Tethered Underwater Vehicles
Artificial Intelligence in Robotics Laboratory (AiR Lab), Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Aarhus University（人工智能机器人实验室（AiR实验室），电气与计算机工程系，阿arhus大学）；NestAI；EIVA a/s（EIVA公司）；Deutsches Forschungszentrum für Künstliche Intelligenz GmbH (DFKI)（德国人工智能研究中心（DFKI））；Automatic Control Group, Department of Electrical Engineering and Information Technology, Paderborn University（自动控制组，电气工程与信息科技系，帕德博恩大学）
UAVs have been widely used in visual inspections of buildings, bridges and other structures. In either outdoor autonomous or semi-autonomous flights missions strong GPS signal is vital for UAV to locate its own positions. However, strong GPS signal is not always available, and it can degrade or fully loss underneath large structures or close to power lines, which can cause serious control issues or even UAV crashes. Such limitations highly restricted the applications of UAV as a routine inspection tool in various domains. In this paper a vision-model-based real-time self-positioning method is …
Bayesian Learning for the Robust Verification of Autonomous Robots
University of Warwick（华威大学）；University of York（约克大学）；Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica（荷兰国家数学与计算机科学研究所）；Eindhoven University of Technology（埃因霍温理工大学）；University of Glasgow（格拉斯哥大学）
SLEI3D: Simultaneous Exploration and Inspection via Heterogeneous Fleets under Limited Communication
School of Advanced Manufacturing and Robotics, Peking University（北京大学先进制造与机器人学院）；Division of Natural and Applied Sciences, Duke Kunshan University（杜克昆山大学自然科学与应用科学系）
Czech Technical University（捷克理工大学）；Faculty of Electrical Engineering（电气工程学院）
This paper concerns fault-tolerant power transmission line inspection planning as a generalization of the multiple traveling salesmen problem. The addressed inspection planning problem is formulated as a single-depot multiple-vehicle scenario, where the inspection vehicles are constrained by the battery budget limiting their inspection time. The inspection vehicle is assumed to be an autonomous multi-copter with a wide range of possible flight speeds influencing battery consumption. The inspection plan is represented by multiple routes for vehicles providing full coverage over inspection targe…
A Navigation System for ROV's inspection on Fish Net Cage
ZJU-Hangzhou Global Scientific and Technological Innovation Center（浙江大学杭州国际科技创新中心）；College of Biosystems Engineering and Food Science, Zhejiang University（浙江大学生物系统工程与食品科学学院）；Department of Biological and Agricultural Engineering, University of California, Davis（加州大学戴维斯分校生物与农业工程系）
University of Texas at Austin（德克萨斯大学奥斯汀分校）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）
This paper considers the problem of safe mission planning of dynamic systems operating under uncertain environments. Much of the prior work on achieving robust and safe control requires solving second-order cone programs (SOCP). Unfortunately, existing general purpose SOCP methods are often infeasible for real-time robotic tasks due to high memory and computational requirements imposed by existing general optimization methods. The key contribution of this paper is a fast and memory-efficient algorithm for SOCP that would enable robust and safe mission planning on-board robots in real-time. Our…
This work establishes COMPRA, a compact and reactive autonomy framework for fast deployment of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) in subterranean Search-and-Rescue (SAR) missions. A COMPRA-enabled MAV is able to autonomously explore previously unknown areas while specific mission criteria are considered e.g. an object of interest is identified and localized, the remaining useful battery life, the overall desired exploration mission duration. The proposed architecture follows a low-complexity algorithmic design to facilitate fully on-board computations, including nonlinear control, state-estimation, …
European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN)（欧洲核子研究组织）；Royal Institute of Technology (KTH)（皇家理工学院）
A mobile robot deployed for remote inspection, surveying or rescue missions can fail due to various possibilities and can be hardware or software related. These failure scenarios necessitate manual recovery (self-rescue) of the robot from the environment. It would bring unforeseen challenges to recover the mobile robot if the environment where it was deployed had hazardous or harmful conditions (e.g. ionizing radiations). While it is not fully possible to predict all the failures in the robot, failures can be reduced by employing certain design/usage considerations. Few example failure cases b…
Modern autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) have advanced sensing capabilities including sonar, cameras, acoustic communication, and diverse bio-sensors. Instead of just sensing its environment and storing the data for post-Mission inspection, an AUV could use the collected information to gain an understanding of its environment, and based on this understanding autonomously adapt its behavior to enhance the overall effectiveness of its mission. Many such tasks are highly computation intensive. This paper presents the results of a case study that illustrates the effectiveness of an energy-awar…
The Mining industry considers the deployment of MAV for autonomous inspection of tunnels and shafts to increase safety and productivity. However, mines are challenging and harsh environments that have a direct effect on the degradation of high-end and expensive utilized components over time. Inspired by this effect, this article presents a low cost and modular platform for designing a fully autonomous navigating MAV without requiring any prior information from the surrounding environment. The design of the proposed aerial vehicle can be considered as a consumable platform that can be instantly…
