Related papers: Autonomous visual inspection of large-scale infras…
Visual inspection is the predominant technique for evaluating the condition of civil infrastructure. The recent advances in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and artificial intelligence have made the visual inspections faster, safer, and more…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have recently shown great performance collecting visual data through autonomous exploration and mapping in building inspection. Yet, the number of studies is limited considering the post processing of the…
This paper presents a real-time control system for surface inspection using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs are coordinated in a specific formation to collect data of the inspecting objects. The communication platform for…
Recently, there have been numerous advances in the development of biologically inspired lightweight Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs). While autonomous navigation is fairly straight-forward for large UAVs as expensive sensors and monitoring…
Exploration and mapping of unknown environments is a fundamental task in applications for autonomous robots. In this article, we present a complete framework for deploying MAVs in autonomous exploration missions in unknown subterranean…
This article presents novel designs of autonomous UAV prototypes specifically developed for inspecting GPS-denied tunnel construction environments with dynamic human and robotic presence. Our UAVs integrate advanced sensor suites and robust…
The usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) in the context of structural health inspection is recently gaining tremendous popularity. Camera mounted UAVs enable the fast acquisition of a large number of images often used for mapping, 3D…
This article proposes a novel Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) framework for Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) autonomous navigation in constrained environments. The introduced framework allows us to consider the nonlinear dynamics of…
Autonomous Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have the potential to be employed for surveillance and monitoring tasks. By perching and staring on one or multiple locations aerial robots can save energy while concurrently increasing their overall…
In this paper, a new demonstration-based path-planning framework for the visual inspection of large structures using UAVs is proposed. We introduce UPPLIED: UAV Path PLanning for InspEction through Demonstration, which utilizes a…
The use of Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) for inspection and surveillance missions has proved to be extremely useful, however, their usability is negatively impacted by the large power requirements and the limited operating time. This work…
This letter presents a self-contained system for robust deployment of autonomous aerial vehicles in environments without access to global navigation systems and with limited lighting conditions. The proposed system, application-tailored for…
In this paper, we present a vision based collaborative localization framework for groups of micro aerial vehicles (MAV). The vehicles are each assumed to be equipped with a forward-facing monocular camera, and to be capable of communicating…
Visual monitoring operations underwater require both observing the objects of interest in close-proximity, and tracking the few feature-rich areas necessary for state estimation.This paper introduces the first navigation framework, called…
An important open problem in robotic planning is the autonomous generation of 3D inspection paths -- that is, planning the best path to move a robot along in order to inspect a target structure. We recently suggested a new method for…
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have great potential in urban traffic monitoring due to their rapid speed, cost-effectiveness, and extensive field-of-view, while being unconstrained by traffic congestion. However, their limited flight…
A robotic system of multiple unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has the potential for advancing autonomous object geolocation performance. Much research has focused on algorithmic improvements on individual…
In this paper, we propose a systematic framework for fast exploration of complex and large 3-D environments using micro aerial vehicles (MAVs). The key insight is the organic integration of the frontier-based and sampling-based strategies…
An important capability of autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) is autonomous landing while avoiding collision with obstacles in the process. Such capability requires real-time local trajectory planning. Although trajectory-planning…
This paper presents a new swarm intelligence-based approach to deal with the cooperative path planning problem of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which is essential for the automatic inspection of infrastructure. The approach uses a 3D…