Optimal Planning of a Mobile Sensor for Aircraft Rivet Inspection

This paper addresses the path planning problem of a mobile sensor, which is a micro Crawler robot equipped with a Eddy Current probe, for aircraft rivet inspection. Due to the specific movement characteristic of the Crawler robot, the path, or the rivet sequence should enable the Crawler robot to realize the localization-and-reposition process. Therefore a final path is subject to the following three requirements: i) the distance between any two consecutive rivets on the path should be less than a threshold distance; ii) the number of turns should be minimized and iii) the overall distance should be minimized. In this paper, a novel algorithm is developed to generate the required path. This algorithm first identifies the minimum set of line segments partitioning all the rivets and then connects the line segments to minimize the overall distance. Simulation results are provided to validate the proposed algorithm.