I-Corps Teams: Drone and Robotic Systems for Civil Infrastructure Inspection and Environmental Monitoring

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There is an increasing number of drones used to assist human in many kinds of daily work. It saves a great amount of cost and human effort. Moreover, it is safer when drones are deployed to monitor dangerous situations such as wildfire, volcano, etc. In particular, photographers and movie makers are now very interested in using drones for aerial photography. They can shoot high quality pictures from different angles from the air which used to be done by a cameraman sitting on a helicopter. Thanks to their ease of using, more and more drones appear in big events. In addition, farmers who own large area of crop are really on demand of drones for monitoring those areas. Same concept can apply to companies to observe and survey a specific area for security purposes. Besides, there are a huge number of bridges in the US which are in very poor condition and needed to be inspected and fixed as soon as possible. In this situation, drones and/or robotic systems can be deployed to inspect the entire bridges efficiently and safely because they can easily access the inspection areas that human inspectors may not be able to. Collaborating with the Nevada Advanced Autonomous Systems Innovation Center (NAASIC), this team has successfully developed several drone and robotic platforms to serve for major practical applications such as crop managements, and civil infrastructure inspection and evaluation like bridges.The main goal of this I-Corps project is to finalize and commercialize the proposed drone and robotic systems for the above mentioned applications. The typical customers of the proposed innovation are farmers who need drones to easily manage their crops, bridge management contractors who seek for a creative, efficient, low cost and safe bridge inspection tool, and first responders who can use drones to efficiently predict and monitor wildfire in large areas, etc. The team will focus on: (1) finalize drone and robotic prototypes as well as software integration of various inspection sensors to fit with each particular application; (2) complete the sensor fusion mechanism to accurately fuse various sensing data from laser scanners, camera,infrared sensors, and 3D structure sensors, etc.; (3) extensively test the proposed platforms on the fields; (4) interview customers to further understand the market need; (5) develop commercialization plans for these drone and robotic products. The proposed project will generate knowledge and enabling tools for designing new drone- robotic technologies for various practical applications. The successful completion of the proposed research will provide broad use of drones and robotic systems to solve real world problems.