Planning System for Integrated Autonomous Infrastructure Inspection using UAVs

Structural inspection is a critical task nowadays. The huge amount of civil infrastructures and industrial facilities makes tedious the task of continuously track their health. This task requires several resources and takes excessive time to operators. This article contributes with a complete system to facilitate the automation of infrastructure inspection using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). The system autonomously controls the UAV towards a set of inspection points chosen by the operators, allowing them to inspect unreachable locations in seconds. A planning algorithm computes the best location to observe the target point and calculates feasible safe trajectories for the UAV to reach each of the locations. All the system is packed into an human-machine interface which facilitates the inspection tasks.