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

越来越多的无人机被用于协助人类进行各种日常工作。它节省了大量的成本和人力。而且，当无人机被部署用于监测野火、火山等危险情况时，它更安全，特别是摄影师和电影制片人现在对使用无人机进行航拍非常感兴趣。他们可以从空中从不同角度拍摄高质量的照片，而这通常是由坐在直升机上的摄影师完成的。由于其易用性，越来越多的无人机出现在大型活动中。此外，拥有大面积作物的农民确实需要无人机来监控这些地区。同样的概念也适用于公司出于安全目的观察和调查特定区域。此外，美国有大量的桥梁状况非常差，需要尽快检查和修复。在这种情况下，可以部署无人机和/或机器人系统来有效和安全地检查整个桥梁，因为它们可以轻松进入人类检查员可能无法进入的检查区域。该团队与内华达州先进自主系统创新中心（NAASIC）合作，成功开发了多个无人机和机器人平台，用于农作物管理和桥梁等民用基础设施的检查和评估等主要实际应用。该I-Corps项目的主要目标是完成上述应用的无人机和机器人系统并将其商业化。拟议创新的典型客户是需要无人机轻松管理作物的农民，寻求创造性，高效，低成本和安全桥梁检查工具的桥梁管理承包商，以及可以使用无人机有效预测和监测大面积野火的第一响应者等。（1）完成无人机和机器人原型以及各种检测传感器的软件集成，以适应每个特定应用;（2）完善传感器融合机制，精确融合激光扫描仪、摄像头、红外传感器、三维结构传感器等各种传感数据; (3)在现场广泛测试拟议的平台;（4）采访客户，以进一步了解市场需求;（5）为这些无人机和机器人产品制定商业化计划。拟议的项目将产生知识和使能工具，用于为各种实际应用设计新的无人机-机器人技术。拟议研究的成功完成将提供广泛使用无人机和机器人系统来解决真实的世界问题。

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.