Automating Aircraft Scanning for Inspection or 3D Model Creation with a UAV and Optimal Path Planning

Visual inspections of aircraft exterior surfaces are required in aircraft maintenance routines for identifying possible defects such as dents, cracks, leaking, broken or missing parts, etc. This process is time-consuming and is also prone to error if performed manually. Therefore, it has become a trend to use mobile robots equipped with visual sensors to perform automated inspections. For such a robotic inspection, a digital model of the aircraft is usually required for planning the robot's path, but a CAD model of the entire aircraft is usually inaccessible to most maintenance shops. It is very labor-intensive and time-consuming to generate an accurate digital model of an aircraft, or even a large portion of it, because the scanning work still must be performed manually or by a manually controlled robotic system. This paper presents a two-stage approach of automating aircraft scanning with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) or autonomous drone equipped with a red-green-blue and depth (RGB-D) camera for detailed inspection or for reconstructing a digital replica of the aircraft when its original CAD model is unavailable. In the first stage, the UAV-camera system follows a predefined path far from the aircraft surface (for safety) to quickly scan the aircraft and generate a coarse model of the aircraft. Then, an optimal scanning path (much closer to the surface) in the sense of the shortest flying distance for full coverage is computed based on the coarse model. In the second stage, the UAV-camera system follows the computed path to closely inspect the surface for possible defects or scan the surface for generating a dense and precise model of the aircraft. We solved the coverage path planning (CPP) problem for the aircraft inspection or scanning using a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm. We also implemented the max-min ant system (MMAS) strategy to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach. We carried out a digital experiment and the results showed that our approach can scan 70% of the aircraft surface within one hour, which is much more efficient than manual scanning.

Automated summary

This paper presents a two-stage approach of automating aircraft scanning with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) equipped with a RGB-D camera. In the first stage, the UAV scans the aircraft from a safe distance to quickly generate a coarse model. In the second stage, an optimal scanning path is computed to closely inspect the surface or generate a dense model. Experimental results showed that this approach is more efficient than manual scanning.