Autonomous exploration of indoor environments with a micro-aerial vehicle

Confined spaces industrial inspection with micro aerial vehicles and laser range finder localization

“…For this reason, in the proposed system, the drone height is computed from upwards and downwards looking sensors data using an SLAM algorithm consisting of Kalman filters. The altitude estimation method firstly designed for an indoor multi-floor building exploration, 9 adds upwards looking sensor data to the formulation by Gronska et al 35 As anticipated in the hardware description ('System description' section), the system can be equipped alternatively with sonars sensors or with long range camera sensors. The camera sensors option allows greater range of distance measurement and is composed by an embedded module containing both a camera and an LED emitter.…”

“…In addition to the aforementioned applications, such devices have proven their flexibility in many other fields including but not limited to agriculture,. 15 search and rescue, 16 exploration and mapping, 9 dam inspection, early fire detection and forest protection, traffic monitoring, aerial photography, surveillance and reconnaissance, chemical spraying and entertainment industry and filming. A detailed analysis for civil application has been provided in Sarris and Atlas.…”

“…substituting the histogramic in-motion mapping (HIMM) 46 with an occupancy grid environment map computed as in Pepe et al. 9 The basic idea of the occupancy grid algorithm is to compute the posterior probability of the map only knowing the observation data and the previously estimated robot path. The space is partitioned into small grid cells where each cell ok has an occupancy probability ptrue(oktrue) which takes a value between 0 (free) and 1 (occupied).…”

“…In a later work, 9 we extended the indoor inspection task with the ability to explore multiple floors buildings introducing a floor recognition and level merging algorithm.…”

Advanced RFID-Robot With Rotating Antennas for Smart Inventory in High-Density Shelving Systems

“…Robot motion can be pursued thanks to a remote control or an autonomous navigation system. Indeed, robots can be moved in the operating scenario through the knowledge of the map or they can perform Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) [4]- [6], by acquiring environment information in real-time. For this purpose, several solutions can be adopted.…”