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 Systematic Literature Survey of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Based Structural Health Monitoring

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being employed in a multitude of civil applications owing to their ease of use, low maintenance, affordability, high-mobility, and ability to hover. UAVs are being utilized for real-time monitoring of road traffic, providing wireless coverage, remote sensing, search and rescue operations, delivery of goods, security and surveillance, precision agriculture, and civil infrastructure inspection. They are the next big revolution in technology and civil infrastructure, and it is expected to dominate more than $45 billion market value. The thesis surveys the UAV assisted Structural Health Monitoring or SHM literature over the last decade and categorize UAVs based on their aerodynamics, payload, design of build, and its applications. Further, the thesis presents the payload product line to facilitate the SHM tasks, details the different applications of UAVs exploited in the last decade to support civil structures, and discusses the critical challenges faced in UASHM applications across various domains. Finally, the thesis presents two artificial neural network-based structural damage detection models and conducts a detailed performance evaluation on multiple platforms like edge computing and cloud computing

MusA: Using Indoor Positioning and Navigation to Enhance Cultural Experiences in a museum

In recent years there has been a growing interest into the use of multimedia mobile guides in museum environments. Mobile devices have the capabilities to detect the user context and to provide pieces of information suitable to help visitors discovering and following the logical and emotional connections that develop during the visit. In this scenario, location based services (LBS) currently represent an asset, and the choice of the technology to determine users' position, combined with the definition of methods that can effectively convey information, become key issues in the design process. In this work, we present MusA (Museum Assistant), a general framework for the development of multimedia interactive guides for mobile devices. Its main feature is a vision-based indoor positioning system that allows the provision of several LBS, from way-finding to the contextualized communication of cultural contents, aimed at providing a meaningful exploration of exhibits according to visitors' personal interest and curiosity. Starting from the thorough description of the system architecture, the article presents the implementation of two mobile guides, developed to respectively address adults and children, and discusses the evaluation of the user experience and the visitors' appreciation of these application