Infrastructure inspection using a team of unmanned aerial vehicles

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The expected outcome of this research project is a practical solution to infrastructure inspection using multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Regularly inspecting large structures, such as bridges, buildings, and wind turbines, is critically important to ensure their safety and timely repair, but is expensive, cumbersome, and dangerous. Providing governments and businesses with versatile, reliable, turnkey inspection solutions will benefit the industries needing inspections as well as Canadians who rely on the services of those industries. Existing UAV-based inspections are done using one drone with line-of-sight (LOS) positioning information to a Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS). To realize faster and more complex inspections, this research project considers the use of multiple UAVs endowed with both GNSS and Ultra-Wideband (UWB) sensors. GNSS and UWB are complementary sensors; GNSS provides absolute position information while UWB can be used to provide relative position information between UAVs. The navigation, path planning, and mapping algorithms developed as part of this research program will enable traditionally difficult or impossible inspections, such as inspection of the underside of a bridge, or the inspection of a building in a dense urban environment. The end goal of this research project is to experimentally demonstrate the robust and reliable inspections using multiple UAVs.