2,107 research outputs found
Autonomous 3D Exploration of Large Structures Using an UAV Equipped with a 2D LIDAR
This paper addressed the challenge of exploring large, unknown, and unstructured
industrial environments with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The resulting system combined
well-known components and techniques with a new manoeuvre to use a low-cost 2D laser to measure
a 3D structure. Our approach combined frontier-based exploration, the Lazy Theta* path planner, and
a flyby sampling manoeuvre to create a 3D map of large scenarios. One of the novelties of our system
is that all the algorithms relied on the multi-resolution of the octomap for the world representation.
We used a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HitL) simulation environment to collect accurate measurements
of the capability of the open-source system to run online and on-board the UAV in real-time. Our
approach is compared to different reference heuristics under this simulation environment showing
better performance in regards to the amount of explored space. With the proposed approach, the UAV
is able to explore 93% of the search space under 30 min, generating a path without repetition that
adjusts to the occupied space covering indoor locations, irregular structures, and suspended obstaclesUnión Europea Marie Sklodowska-Curie 64215Unión Europea MULTIDRONE (H2020-ICT-731667)Uniión Europea HYFLIERS (H2020-ICT-779411
A Mission Coordinator Approach for a Fleet of UAVs in Urban Scenarios
Abstract The use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is now common, but although they have been for various applications, there are still a lot of challenges that need to be overcome. One key issue is related to standardizing the use of these vehicles in urban environments and guaranteeing a minimum risk level for the population. To rise to these challenges, autonomous strategies that optimize and coordinate vehicles in cooperative missions and avoid human operators should be developed. The novelty of this paper is the development of an autonomous urban mission coordinator, which is responsible for the high-level logistics of a fleet of heterogeneous vehicles. A multi-variable weighted algorithm based on a tree optimization method is also proposed
Multi-UAV trajectory planning for 3D visual inspection of complex structures
This paper presents a new trajectory planning algorithm for 3D autonomous UAV
volume coverage and visual inspection. The algorithm is an extension of a
state-of-the-art Heat Equation Driven Area Coverage (HEDAC) multi-agent area
coverage algorithm for 3D domains. With a given target exploration density
field, the algorithm designs a potential field and directs UAVs to the regions
of higher potential, i.e., higher values of remaining density. Collisions
between the agents and agents with domain boundaries are prevented by
implementing the distance field and correcting the agent's directional vector
when the distance threshold is reached. A unit cube test case is considered to
evaluate this trajectory planning strategy for volume coverage. For visual
inspection applications, the algorithm is supplemented with camera direction
control. A field containing the nearest distance from any point in the domain
to the structure surface is designed. The gradient of this field is calculated
to obtain the camera orientation throughout the trajectory. Three different
test cases of varying complexities are considered to validate the proposed
method for visual inspection. The simplest scenario is a synthetic portal-like
structure inspected using three UAVs. The other two inspection scenarios are
based on realistic structures where UAVs are commonly utilized: a wind turbine
and a bridge. When deployed to a wind turbine inspection, two simulated UAVs
traversing smooth spiral trajectories have successfully explored the entire
turbine structure while cameras are directed to the curved surfaces of the
turbine's blades. In the bridge test case an efficacious visual inspection of a
complex structure is demonstrated by employing a single UAV and five UAVs. The
proposed methodology is successful, flexible and applicable in real-world UAV
inspection tasks.Comment: 14 page
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