Towards Visual Inspection of Distributed and Irregular Structures: A Unified Autonomy Approach
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Published:2023-09-27
Issue:2
Volume:109
Page:
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ISSN:0921-0296
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Container-title:Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems
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language:en
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Short-container-title:J Intell Robot Syst
Author:
Viswanathan Vignesh KottayamORCID, Lindqvist Björn, Satpute Sumeet Gajanan, Kanellakis Christoforos, Nikolakopoulos George
Abstract
AbstractThis paper highlights the significance of maintaining and enhancing situational awareness in Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) missions. It focuses specifically on investigating the capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) equipped with limited sensing capabilities and onboard computational resources to perform visual inspections of apriori unknown fractured and collapsed structures in unfamiliar environments. The proposed approach, referred to as First Look Inspect-Explore (FLIE), employs a flexible bifurcated behavior tree that leverages real-time RGB image and depth cloud data. By employing a recursive and reactive synthesis of safe view pose within the inspection module, FLIE incorporates a novel active visual guidance scheme for identifying previously inspected surfaces. Furthermore, the integration of a tiered hierarchical exploration module with the visual guidance system enables the UAV to navigate towards new and unexplored structures without relying on a map. This decoupling reduces memory overhead and computational effort by eliminating the need to plan based on an incrementally built, error-prone global map. The proposed autonomy is extensively evaluated through simulation and experimental verification under various scenarios and compared against state-of-art approaches, demonstrating its performance and effectiveness.
Funder
Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme Lulea University of Technology
Publisher
Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Subject
Electrical and Electronic Engineering,Artificial Intelligence,Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering,Mechanical Engineering,Control and Systems Engineering,Software
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