Drone Mission Definition and Implementation for Automated Infrastructure Inspection Using Airborne Sensors

This paper describes a Mission Definition System and the automated flight process it enables to implement measurement plans for discrete infrastructure inspections using aerial platforms, and specifically multi-rotor drones. The mission definition aims at improving planning efficiency with respect t...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Juan A. Besada, Luca Bergesio, Iván Campaña, Diego Vaquero-Melchor, Jaime López-Araquistain, Ana M. Bernardos, José R. Casar
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2018-04-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/18/4/1170
Description
Summary:This paper describes a Mission Definition System and the automated flight process it enables to implement measurement plans for discrete infrastructure inspections using aerial platforms, and specifically multi-rotor drones. The mission definition aims at improving planning efficiency with respect to state-of-the-art waypoint-based techniques, using high-level mission definition primitives and linking them with realistic flight models to simulate the inspection in advance. It also provides flight scripts and measurement plans which can be executed by commercial drones. Its user interfaces facilitate mission definition, pre-flight 3D synthetic mission visualisation and flight evaluation. Results are delivered for a set of representative infrastructure inspection flights, showing the accuracy of the flight prediction tools in actual operations using automated flight control.
ISSN:1424-8220