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.