Long-Endurance Sensing and Mapping using a Hand-Launchable Solar-Powered UAV

ISSN:1610-743

Marker based Thermal-Inertial Localization for Aerial Robots in Obscurant Filled Environments

For robotic inspection tasks in known environments fiducial markers provide a reliable and low-cost solution for robot localization. However, detection of such markers relies on the quality of RGB camera data, which degrades significantly in the presence of visual obscurants such as fog and smoke. The ability to navigate known environments in the presence of obscurants can be critical for inspection tasks especially, in the aftermath of a disaster. Addressing such a scenario, this work proposes a method for the design of fiducial markers to be used with thermal cameras for the pose estimation of aerial robots. Our low cost markers are designed to work in the long wave infrared spectrum, which is not affected by the presence of obscurants, and can be affixed to any object that has measurable temperature difference with respect to its surroundings. Furthermore, the estimated pose from the fiducial markers is fused with inertial measurements in an extended Kalman filter to remove high frequency noise and error present in the fiducial pose estimates. The proposed markers and the pose estimation method are experimentally evaluated in an obscurant filled environment using an aerial robot carrying a thermal camera.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures, Published in International Symposium on Visual Computing 201

Structural Inspection Planning for Mobile Robots

In this report we present a pipeline for static coverage planning of known objects, which is an important task in the field of mobile robot based inspection. We analyse the main components of the Structural Inspection Planner [1] and embed an improved implementation into a autonomous flight pipeline for UAVs. Triangle mesh models serve as input for an initial viewpoint sampling. Inspection quality and path length are optimized by formulating the viewpoint sampling as constraint QP. We thoroughly evaluate the ROS-based inspection pipeline on synthetic and real models using a Gazebo simulation. Our experimental evaluation shows that while an efficient inspection trajectory could be generated for most of the tested models, the result is very dependent on regular and well formed input models