Borescope tracking and visualization of internal aero-structure with VSLAM

Inspection services being one of the important and most commonly used in Aviation Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul (MRO) services have increased in demand due to the fast expansion in the aviation market in many parts of the world. Improving on the procedures for the aerostructures inspection has become a focus for many MRO servicers due to the reason that aircrafts are complex and meticulous machine that needs to be well taken care of. Presently, the routine checks on the aero plane internal structure are carried out with the help of few technicians and/or engineers with the use of borescope to perform inspections in in-accessible areas. Such methods are often ambiguous due to the reason that the position of borescope is unknown and due to such an ambiguity, it leads to many problems when during inspection especially in cases where there are anomalies (like cracks/fatigue) found which would lead to a tedious process of disassembling a huge structural surface area centered around the area of failure due to the absence of knowledge in the exact position of the borescope. Hence, with an aim to ease the tedious procedure, this paper provides a spark in the creation of a XR based GUI to visualize real-time pose of the borescope to precisely determine the location of the failure, which could then be used to know & monitor the precise location of a point of failure hence easing the whole inspection process while tracking the condition of the internal structures in real-time. This paper proposed a novel system leveraging on the VSLAM (Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) technology and XR (Mix Reality). Experiments results shows that it can estimate both position and orientation in the enclosed internal structure for aero plane and other similar device.