학술논문

FLIE: First-Look Enabled Inspect-Explore Autonomy Toward Visual Inspection of Unknown Distributed and Discontinuous Structures
Document Type
Periodical
Source
IEEE Access Access, IEEE. 11:28140-28150 2023
Subject
Aerospace
Bioengineering
Communication, Networking and Broadcast Technologies
Components, Circuits, Devices and Systems
Computing and Processing
Engineered Materials, Dielectrics and Plasmas
Engineering Profession
Fields, Waves and Electromagnetics
General Topics for Engineers
Geoscience
Nuclear Engineering
Photonics and Electrooptics
Power, Energy and Industry Applications
Robotics and Control Systems
Signal Processing and Analysis
Transportation
Inspection
Visualization
Autonomous aerial vehicles
Robots
Three-dimensional displays
Planning
Search problems
Online services
VIsualization
Visual inspection
aerial robotics
distributed objects
first-look
online planning
unknown environment
Language
ISSN
2169-3536
Abstract
In this article, the problem of an online autonomous aerial inspection, specifically for discontinuous and distributed objects is presented. The proposed approach imposes view culling and photogrammetric constraints based on a geometrically modeled three-dimensional view pyramid, a view cone to filter surfaces by desired observation angle, a framework-integrated passive collision-avoidance scheme with the object under inspection, and a dynamically enveloping bounding-box region to map the visited surfaces. Furthermore, the proposed inspect-explore framework is validated for the case of an unknown environment with no prior knowledge of the object model under inspection. The overall inspection scheme is based on the novel First-Look approach, enabling the UAV to progressively adapt its inspection path to match the profile of the structure autonomously. The implemented exploration strategy imposes a tiered policy enabling the UAV to search, identify and navigate towards the structure for inspection. The presented work utilizes a unified architecture of the aforementioned inspect-explore framework to improve situational awareness in a previously unknown environment by enabling the UAV to explore its surrounding space and identify structures to execute closer inspection tasks. Extended simulations to evaluate the efficacy of the proposed inspect-explore framework are presented with multiple structure scenarios.