Networked drones for concrete structure, environmental, and radiation surveys

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In the past decade, there has been tremendous progress in the development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also called drones. While first products were targeted at consumers, solutions for industrial use cases (for example, inspection, monitoring, and surveillance) are the next frontier. First solutions on the market from companies such as SenseFly and Intel are promising but require an experienced pilot to navigate the UAV. The pilot is responsible for the high-level UAV mission planning and navigation in cluttered environments, while some of the currently available drones are equipped with distance sensors to support the human and automatically avoid local collisions with the infrastructure. The main goal of this proposal is to develop a fully-automated UAV monitoring solution for industrial sites. A combination of localization sensors will be integrated into the vehicle to localize the vehicle with high accuracy both indoors and outdoors. To monitor large industrial sites efficiently, we propose a multi-UAV strategy. A ground station coordinates and optimizes the flight paths of multiple drones and makes sure that they return back to the base station safely when they run low on battery or have any other technical problem. Furthermore, the University of Toronto (UofT) has deep knowledge in concrete integrity and aging assessment. In order for this knowledge to translate to a UAV-based solution, a lightweight sensor suite is researched and demonstrated in proof-of-concept experiments with the goal of achieving automated, remote concrete health assessment. Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is an important partner on this project and will provide direct input in terms of the requirements for a UAV-based monitoring solution.