Autonomous UAV-Based Structural Damage Exploration Platform for Post-Disaster Reconnaissance

Rapid structural health inspection process is essential for post-disaster reconnaissance. Nowadays, visual inspection still dominates the practice, which is time-consuming, expensive, and unsafe. To reduce labor costs and guarantee personnel safety, we develop a fully autonomous UAV-based structural damage exploration platform that explores and rebuilds post-disaster environment maps with limited prior information. As a result, environment maps can be used for further damage detection and risk evaluation. The proposed platform implements a closed-loop control strategy in the UAV with a 3D lidar sensor for navigating itself to explore the unknown post-catastrophe environment. The control system integrates a lidar-based simultaneous localization and mapping algorithm and a next best view planner. The UAV can automatically rebuild a partial environment map and determine appropriate viewpoints to visit next. We tested our autonomous UAV inspection system with constrained damaged infrastructure in a virtual reality environment, RSASDA. The proposed UAV-based platform can rebuild the targeted infrastructure map and guarantee the required accuracy and completeness.