Mobile Sensor Navigation with Miniature Active Camera for Structure Inspection

Structural health monitoring and inspection is very important for many civil, mechanical and aerospace systems. It is a critical step in maintaining and improving the structural integrity of these systems. In this paper, we propose to develop an automated, intelligent inspection system for these engineered structures, which employs a team of intelligent climbing robots and a command robot to collaboratively carry out the inspection task. To support autonomous navigation, a Miniature Active Camera (MaCam) module is designed, which can be used in the pose calibration of the robot. The robot pose error model is introduced. Based on that, the path planning problem for a single robot is studied and a hierarchical algorithm is developed to generate a path that satisfies the navigation requirements of the robot. Both the error model and the path planning algorithm is verified in experiments.