AIRobots: Innovative aerial service robots for remote inspection by contact (original) (raw)
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Aerial Service Robotics: the AIRobots Perspective
This paper presents the main vision and research activities of the ongoing European project AIRobots (Innovative Aerial Service Robot for Remote Inspection by Contact, www.airobots.eu). The goal of AIRobots is to develop a new generation of aerial service robots capable of supporting human beings in all those activities that require the ability to interact actively and safely with environments not constrained on ground but, indeed, airborne. Besides presenting the main ideas and the research activities within the three-year project, the paper shows the first technological outcomes obtained during the first year and a half of activity.
Realizing the Aerial Robotic Worker for Inspection Operations
ArXiv, 2017
This report overviews a set of recent contributions in the field of path planning that were developed to enable the realization of the autonomous aerial robotic worker for inspection operations. The specific algorithmic contributions address several fundamental challenges of robotic inspection and exploration, and specifically those of optimal coverage planning given an a priori known model of the structure to be inspected, full coverage, optimized and fast inspection path planning, as well as efficient exploration of completely unknown environments and structures. All of the developed path planners support both holonomic and nonholonomic systems, and respect the on–board sensor model and constraints. An overview of the achieved results, followed by an integrating architecture in order to enable fully autonomous and highly–efficient infrastructure inspection in both known and unknown environments.
Aerial robotic contact-based inspection: planning and control
Autonomous Robots, 2015
The challenge of aerial robotic contact-based inspection is the driving motivation of this paper. The problem is approached on both levels of control and pathplanning by introducing algorithms and control laws that ensure optimal inspection through contact and controlled aerial robotic physical interaction. Regarding the flight and physical interaction stabilization, a hybrid model predictive control framework is proposed, based on which a typical quadrotor becomes capable of stable and active interaction, accurate trajectory tracking on environmental surfaces as well as force control. Convex optimization techniques enabled the explicit computation of such a controller which accounts for the dynamics in free-flight as well as during physical interaction, ensures the global stability of the hybrid system and provides optimal responses while respecting the physical limitations of the vehicle. Further augmentation of this scheme, allowed the incorporation of a last-resort obstacle avoidance mechanism at the control level. Relying on such a control law, a contact-based inspection planner was developed which computes the optimal route within a given set of inspection points while avoiding any obstacles or other no-fly zones on the environmental surface. Extensive experimental studies that included complex "aerial-writing" tasks, B Kostas Alexis
Towards an autonomous flying robot for inspections in open and constrained spaces
A Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) capable of navigating in outdoor environments by means of proprioceptive data fusion techniques as well as in indoor and particularly in constrained spaces is here presented. The aim of this system is to inspect failures or procedures correctness inside dangerous areas where human presence should be avoided for long or short time periods. This solution has been oriented toward the specific context of visual inspection of industrial area and it has been tested in a laboratory testbed. In this paper we present hardware and software development of a MAV that can reliably navigate both in outdoor and indoor scenarios making it possible to autonomously change the working location.
Robotic assistants for aircraft inspectors
Industrial Robot: An …, 1998
Aircraft flight pressurization/depressurization cycling causes the skin to inflate and deflate, stressing it around the rivets that fasten it to the airframe. The resulting strain, exacerbated by corrosion, drives the growth of initially microscopic cracks. To avoid catastrophe, aircraft are inspected periodically for cracks and corrosion. The inspection technology employed is ~90% naked-eye vision. We have developed and demonstrated robotic deployment of both remote enhanced 3D-stereoscopic video instrumentation for visual inspection and remote eddy current probes for instrumented inspection. This article describes the aircraft skin inspection application, how robotic deployment may alleviate human performance problems and workplace hazards during inspection, practical robotic deployment systems, their instrumentation packages, and our progress toward developing image enhancement and understanding techniques that could help aircraft inspectors to find cracks, corrosion, and other visually detectable damage.
Human-Robot Cooperation in Surface Inspection Aerial Missions
2017
The goal of the work presented in this paper is to facilitate the cooperation between human operators and aerial robots to perform surface inspection missions. Our approach is based on a model of human collaborative control with a mixed initiative interaction. In the paper, we present our human-robot cooperation model based on the combination of a supervisory mode and an assistance mode with a set of interaction patterns. We developed a software system implementing this interaction model and carried out several real flight experiments that proved that this approach can be used in aerial robotics for surface inspection missions (e.g., in vision based indoor missions). Compared to a conventional tele-operated inspection system, the solution presented in this paper gives more autonomy to the aerial systems, reducing the cognitive load of the operator during the mission development.
A simulator environment for aerial service robot prototypes
2013 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2013
This paper provides an architectural description from the software point of view of the simulator environment developed for the AIRobots project. The scope of the project is the realization of an aerial service robotic prototype, a sort of robotic hand to be employed in inspection-by-contact tasks. The simulator is then crucial in both the training of the human operator, and as a support tool for the development and validation of low-and high-level control algorithms. The tasks that can be performed are not limited to free-flight missions, but include also to the cases in which the robot has to actively interact with the environment. The simulator relies on Simulink and Blender, and has been designed with a modular structure that makes software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-theloop simulations possible by simply replacing the different control modules with the real controllers on the prototypes.
1998
Aircraft flight pressurization/depressurization cycling causes the skin to inflate and deflate, stressing it around the rivets that fasten it to the airframe. The resulting strain, exacerbated by corrosion, drives the growth of initially microscopic cracks. To avoid catastrophe, aircraft are inspected periodically for cracks and corrosion. The inspection technology employed is ~90% naked-eye vision. We have developed and demonstrated robotic deployment of both remote enhanced 3D-stereoscopic video instrumentation for visual inspection and remote eddy current probes for instrumented inspection. This article describes the aircraft skin inspection application, how robotic deployment may alleviate human performance problems and workplace hazards during inspection, practical robotic deployment systems, their instrumentation packages, and our progress toward developing image enhancement and understanding techniques that could help aircraft inspectors to find cracks, corrosion, and other visually detectable damage.
Autonomous aerial flight path inspection using advanced manufacturing techniques
Robotica
SUMMARYRobotic systems have shown capabilities to perform inspection tasks in dangerous and difficult-to-access environments, such as those found in different components of power plants. However, most of the current robotic inspection technology is designed for specific components. Aerial robots, commonly termed as Drones, have raised an option to inspect a wider range of structural components. Nevertheless, current aerial inspecting technology still relies on a human pilot with limited line of sight, field of view and a reduced perception as the drone flies away, which prevents performing close-quarter inspection in intricate, structurally complex and GPS-denied environments. This work introduces offline inspection path generation methods based on robotics-integrated to manufacturing techniques. One method uses computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) techniques and the other an additive manufacturing (AM) approach to generate the flight path. That is to say, the drone would fly along th...
Design and Control of an Aerial Manipulator for Contact-based Inspection
ArXiv, 2018
Manipulator dynamics, external forces and moments raise issues in stability and efficient control during aerial manipulation. Additionally, multirotor Micro Aerial Vehicles impose stringent limits on payload, actuation and system states. In view of these challenges, this work addressed the design and control of a 3-DoF serial aerial manipulator for contact inspection. A lightweight design with sufficient dexterous workspace for NDT (Non-Destructive Testing) inspection is presented. This operation requires the regulation of normal force on the inspected point. Contact dynamics have been discussed along with a simulation of the closed-loop dynamics during contact. The simulated controller preserves inherent system nonlinearities and uses a passivity approach to ensure the convergence of error to zero. A transition scheme from free-flight to contact was developed along with the hardware and software frameworks for implementation. This paper concludes with important drawbacks and prospe...