Dry Coupled Ultrasonic Non-Destructive Evaluation Using an Over-Actuated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Watson, Robert J.; Kamel, Mina; Zhang, Dayi; Dobie, Gordon; MacLeod, Charles N.; Pierce, S. Gareth; Nieto, Juan

doi:10.1109/tase.2021.3094966

Cited by 19 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 45 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Satellite navigation or computer vision solutions may also be used. Further details of this experimental assessment are provided in [19].…”

Section: Experimental Results: Voliromentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Techniques for Contact-Based Structural Health Monitoring With Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Watson¹,

ZHAO²,

ZHANG³

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Structural Health Monitoring (SHM) has become commonplace across civil and energy generation applications with hazardous or time-consuming inspection processes. Expanding upon surface screening offered by non-contact remote visual inspection UAVs, systems are now beginning to incorporate contact-based Non-Destructive Evaluation (NDE) transducers to detect and monitor incipient sub-surface flaws. However, challenges to environmental interaction using conventional multirotor platform dynamics amid aerodynamic disturbances have frustrated efforts for stable and repeatable sensor placement. Herein, two distinct UAV systems are evaluated as a means to overcome these challenges. The first utilizes vectored thrust with a tri-copter layout. It may dynamically reorient dual-axis tilting propellers to directly effect interaction force and deploy drycoupled ultrasonic thickness measurement across omnidirectional targets. In static point and rolling scan measurement, laboratory tests demonstrate mean absolute error below 0.1 mm and 0.3 mm, respectively. The second UAV uses rigidly affixed multidirectional propellers to reverse and redirect its net thrust. Landing atop cylindrical structures it may crawl around their circumference, supporting itself without magnetic or vacuum adhesion. Arbitrary static position is maintained to within a mean deviation of 0.7 mm. Lastly, comparative discussion of each system informs strategies for further development of contact-based aerial SHM and its adoption to industrial practice.

show abstract

“…Satellite navigation or computer vision solutions may also be used. Further details of this experimental assessment are provided in [19].…”

Section: Experimental Results: Voliromentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The Voliro [18] platform, as in Figure 1(a), is developed as a generic solution for contact-based aerial interaction. Here, as previously reported in [19], it deploys aerial ultrasonic thickness measurement, applicable across targets including petrochemical storage tanks, pipes, steel chimneys, and offshore structures.…”

Section: System Description: Voliromentioning

confidence: 98%

Techniques for Contact-Based Structural Health Monitoring With Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Watson¹,

ZHAO²,

ZHANG³

et al. 2022

Proceedings of the 13th International Workshop on Structural Health Monitoring

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Considering the low cost, extremely lightweight and high accuracy requirements, the ultrasonic based localisation technique can be promising as the potential solution [13]. Currently, the ultrasonic sensor has already been widely utilised on UAV systems for target detection, structure inspection, smart navigation and collision avoidance [14]- [16]. One of the typical representative commercial solutions can be the system designed by Marvelmind [17], lots of relevant researches have already been carried out with this commercial system.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ultrasonic- and IMU-Based High-Precision UAV Localization for the Low-Cost Autonomous Inspection in Oil and Gas Pressure Vessels

Yang

et al. 2023

IEEE Trans. Ind. Inf.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

With the increasing demands for unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) based autonomous inspections in the oil and gas industry, one of the challenging issues for 3D UAV positioning has emerged due to the satellite signal blocking. Considering the existing characteristics of the ultrasonic based technique, such as the low cost, extremely lightweight and high positioning accuracy, it can be promising as the potential solution. Nevertheless, the low position update rate and vulnerable positioning performance to the changing environment still limit its applications on UAV. Therefore, in this article, an ultrasonic and inertial measurement unit (IMU) based localisation algorithm and low cost UAV autonomous inspection system are presented. With the incorporation of the IMU, the position update rate, accuracy and stability of the algorithm can all be significantly improved. This is done by the adaptively estimated noise covariance matrices through the proposed adaptive extended Kalman filter (AEKF) algorithm and the added weighting factors. Followed by, an additional virtual observation process is presented to overcome the unavailability of the observation information for further performance improvement. Finally, extensive numerical results and field tests demonstrate that the proposed algorithm and system can achieve the high update rate, reliable, accurate and precision UAV positioning in oil and gas pressure vessels and are feasible for the UAV autonomous inspection in these environments.

show abstract

“…Aerial interaction tasks such as contact-based inspections [1]- [3] require the flying vehicle to slide a sensor along the surface to be inspected and maintain contact. The state of the art proposes several solutions for the related general push-and-slide problem [4].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Learning Variable Impedance Control for Aerial Sliding on Uneven Heterogeneous Surfaces by Proprioceptive and Tactile Sensing

Zhang

Ott

Tognon

et al. 2022

IEEE Robot. Autom. Lett.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The recent development of novel aerial vehicles capable of physically interacting with the environment leads to new applications such as contact-based inspection. These tasks require the robotic system to exchange forces with partially-known environments, which may contain uncertainties including unknown spatially-varying friction properties and discontinuous variations of the surface geometry. Finding a control strategy that is robust against these environmental uncertainties remains an open challenge. This paper presents a learning-based adaptive control strategy for aerial sliding tasks. In particular, the gains of a standard impedance controller are adjusted in real-time by a policy based on the current control signals, proprioceptive measurements, and tactile sensing. This policy is trained in simulation with simplified actuator dynamics in a student-teacher learning setup. The real-world performance of the proposed approach is verified using a tiltarm omnidirectional flying vehicle. The proposed controller structure combines data-driven and model-based control methods, enabling our approach to successfully transfer directly and without adaptation from simulation to the real platform. Compared to fine-tuned state of the art interaction control methods we achieve reduced tracking error and improved disturbance rejection.

show abstract

Dry Coupled Ultrasonic Non-Destructive Evaluation Using an Over-Actuated Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Cited by 19 publications

References 45 publications

Techniques for Contact-Based Structural Health Monitoring With Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Techniques for Contact-Based Structural Health Monitoring With Multirotor Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Ultrasonic- and IMU-Based High-Precision UAV Localization for the Low-Cost Autonomous Inspection in Oil and Gas Pressure Vessels

Learning Variable Impedance Control for Aerial Sliding on Uneven Heterogeneous Surfaces by Proprioceptive and Tactile Sensing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About