A UAV system for inspection of industrial facilities

This work presents a small-scale Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) capable of performing inspection tasks in enclosed industrial environments. Vehicles with such capabilities have the potential to reduce human involvement in hazardous tasks and can minimize facility outage periods. The results presented generalize to UAS exploration tasks in almost any GPS-denied indoor environment. The contribution of this work is twofold. First, results from autonomous flights inside an industrial boiler of a power plant are presented. A lightweight, vision-aided inertial navigation system provides reliable state estimates under difficult environmental conditions typical for such sites. It relies solely on measurements from an on-board MEMS inertial measurement unit and a pair of cameras arranged in a classical stereo configuration. A model-predictive controller allows for efficient trajectory following and enables flight in close proximity to the boiler surface. As a second contribution, we highlight ongoing developments by displaying state estimation and structure recovery results acquired with an integrated visual/inertial sensor that will be employed on future aerial service robotic platforms. A tight integration in hardware facilitates spatial and temporal calibration of the different sensors and thus enables more accurate and robust ego-motion estimates. Comparison with ground truth obtained from a laser tracker shows that such a sensor can provide motion estimates with drift rates of only few centimeters over the period of a typical flight.