Viewpoint placement for inspection planning

Inspection planning approaches so far have focused on automatically obtaining an optimal set of viewpoints required to cover a given object. While research has provided interesting results, the automatic inspection planning has still not been made a part of the everyday inspection system development process. This is mostly because the plans are difficult to verify and it is impossible to compare them to laboratory-developed plans. In this work, we give an overview of available generate-and-test approaches, evaluate their results for various objects and finally compare them to plans created by inspection system development experts. The comparison emphasizes both benefits and downsides of automated approaches and highlights problems which need to be tackled in the future in order to make the automated inspection planning more applicable.

Automated summary

Inspection planning approaches have mainly focused on automatically obtaining optimal viewpoints for covering a given object. However, these plans are difficult to verify and compare to laboratory-developed plans, which has hindered their integration into everyday inspection system development. In this paper, we provide an overview of generate-and-test approaches, evaluate their results for different objects, and compare them to plans created by inspection system development experts. The comparison highlights both the benefits and downsides of automated approaches, and identifies future challenges for making automated inspection planning more applicable.