Search

This paper presents a novel application of a Multi-frame Super Resolution (MFSR) method for lunar surface imagery called Lunar HighRes-net (L-HRN) . In this work, we adapted and used NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) image database to train the Deep Learning architecture for image super resolution. Additionally, we also gathered an artificial image dataset from our virtual Moon to improve the amount of input data in the neural network training process. The network's architecture follows a standard MFSR algorithm that was enhanced for this specific use case. The proposed MFSR method has been evaluated using the well-known peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR) metric against other generic super-resolution methods of the state of the art. This work aims to improve environmental knowledge about the lunar surface to enhance future autonomous robots capabilities on the surface of the Moon.

This paper presents the design, modeling and control of a fully actuated aerial robot for infrastructure contact inspection as well as its localization system. Health assessment of transport infrastructure involves measurements with sensors in contact with the bridge and tunnel surfaces and the installation of monitoring sensing devices at specific points. The design of the aerial robot presented in the paper includes a 3DoF lightweight arm with a sensorized passive joint which can measure the contact force to regulate the force applied with the sensor on the structure. The aerial platform has been designed with tilted propellers to be fully actuated, achieving independent attitude and position control. It also mounts a &ldquo, docking gear&rdquo, to establish full contact with the infrastructure during the inspection, minimizing the measurement errors derived from the motion of the aerial platform and allowing full contact with the surface regardless of its condition (smooth, rough, ...). The localization system of the aerial robot uses multi-sensor fusion of the measurements of a topographic laser sensor on the ground and a tracking camera and inertial sensors on-board the aerial robot, to be able to fly under the bridge deck or close to the bridge pillars where GNSS satellite signals are not available. The paper also presents the modeling and control of the aerial robot. Validation experiments of the localization system and the control system, and with the aerial robot inspecting a real bridge are also included.

This paper presents an experimental study of the softlanding problem in quadrotors using the induced wind modeling approach. The landing phase has been typically one of the critical phases in drone flight. Landing complexity drastically increases when the drone needs to land on sensitive sites, such as platforms or rack of pipes in refineries (for inspection purposes), in which explosive material is running through or there exist flammable/explosive material in the environment. Multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are usually lightweight platforms and they are significantly disturbed by the aerodynamic ground effect while landing; so, near the ground, those drones are subjected to an external disturbance in proximity to the ground. In this situation, the airflow can be reflected after reaching the ground, disturbing the performance of the rotors significantly. This paper aims to model the induced wind velocity, caused by the propellers to see and consider the ground effect during the landing. The reduction of the total thrust near the ground provides a smooth landing and avoids bumping. The complex wind modeling formulation and limitation of the commercialized autopilots make the implementation a challenging task. Herein we propose how to incorporate the proposed soft-landing algorithm within an existing UAV autopilot. Experimental results show that the proposed approach successfully replicates the wind modeling which leads to a soft-landing. European Union (UE). H2020 779411 Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades (España) RTI2018-102224-B-I00

This paper presents the design, modelling and control of a multirotor for inspection of bridges with full contact. The paper analyzes the aerodynamic ceiling effect when the aerial robot approaches the bridge surface from below, including its aerodynamic characterization using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). The proposed multirotor design takes the modelled aerodynamic effects into account, improving the performance of the aerial platform in terms of the stability and position accuracy during the inspection. Nonlinear attitude and position controllers to manage the aerodynamic effects are derived and tested. Last, outdoor experiments in a real bridge inspection task have been used to validate the system, as well as the controller and the aerodynamic characterization. The experiments carried out also include a complete autonomous mission of the aerial platform during a structural assessment application.

In recent years, aerial manipulators with fully-actuated capabilities are gaining popularity for being used in aerial manipulation operations such as critical infrastructure inspection or aerial manipulation tasks. Those scenarios usually demand the aerial platform to operate in constrained and narrow scenarios. It is well known that in these situations, the interaction of the wake generated by the propellers with the environment can significantly alter and change the performance of the rotors. Most studies have addressed this problem by considering the ground effect in hover conditions or during the landing maneuver for co-planar multirotor. However, few works analyze the behaviour of tilted rotors, which are used in fully actuated multirotor configurations thanks to their omnidirectional motion capabilities. This paper presents a numerical-experimental evaluation of the aerodynamic ground effect for small-scale tilted propellers at low Reynolds numbers. This aerodynamic effect has been experimentally evaluated through an extensive testing campaign in a testbench designed for this purpose which has been complemented by a CFD-based study. CFD results have been validated through a mesh independence study and a CFD-experimental propeller performance comparison. A numerical model has been also proposed to capture the dependence of thrust with distance to the ground and angle of inclination between the propeller and ground planes. We demonstrate that the proximity to the ground of tilted rotors decreases the thrust increment due to the ground effect as the tilt angle (θ) increases. This means that Cheeseman's classical theory is inapplicable, as it only considers the distance from the ground without reference to how the thrust increment changes with the tilt angle. This outcome enables future aerial robotic applications that strongly demand accurate aerodynamic effect models to operate close to obstacles and narrow environments. Comisión Europea H2020-MG-2017-769066 Comisión Europea H2020-ICT-2019-2-871542 Agencia Estatal de Investigación RTI2018-102224-B-I00 Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación FPI PRE2019-089812

In this paper, we propose a new concept of robot which is hybrid, including aerial and crawling subsystems and an arm, and also modular with interchangeable crawling subsystems for different pipe configurations, since it has been designed to cover most industrial oil & gas end-users’ requirements. The robot has the same ability than aerial robots to reach otherwise inaccessible locations, but makes the inspection more efficient, increasing operation time since crawling requires less energy than flying, and achieving better accuracy in the inspection. It also integrates safety-related characteristics for operating in the potentially explosive atmosphere of a refinery, being able to immediately interrupt the inspection if a hazardous situation is detected and carry the sensible parts such as batteries and electronic devices away as soon as possible. The paper presents the design of this platform in detail and shows the feasibility of the whole system performing indoor experiments.

Deploying Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) in safety- and business-critical operations requires demonstrating compliance with applicable regulations and a comprehensive understanding of the residual risk associated with the UAS operation. To support these activities and enable the safe deployment of UAS into civil airspace, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has established a UAS regulatory framework that mandates the execution of safety risk assessment for UAS operations in order to gain authorization to carry out certain types of operations. Driven by this framework, the Joint Authorities for Rulemaking on Unmanned Systems (JARUS) released the Specific Operation Risk Assessment (SORA) methodology that guides the systematic risk assessment for UAS operations. However, existing work on SORA and its applications focuses mainly on single UAS operations, offering limited support for assuring operations conducted with multiple UAS and with autonomous features. Therefore, the work presented in this paper analyzes the application of SORA for a Multi-UAS airframe inspection (AFI) operation, that involves deploying multiple UAS with autonomous features inside an airport. We present the decision-making process of each SORA step and its application to a multiple UAS scenario. The results shows that the procedures and safety features included in the Multi-AFI operation such as workspace segmentation, the independent multi-UAS AFI crew proposed, and the mitigation actions provide confidence that the operation can be conducted safely and can receive a positive evaluation from the competent authorities. We also present our key findings from the application of SORA and discuss how it can be extended to better support multi-UAS operations. Unión Europea 101017258

Nº Artículo 9314142 This article presents a team of multiple Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) to perform cooperative missions for autonomous construction. In particular, the UAVs have to build a wall made of bricks that need to be picked and transported from different locations. First, we propose a novel architecture for multi-robot systems operating in outdoor and unstructured environments, where robustness and reliability play a key role. Then, we describe the design of our aerial platforms and grasping mechanisms to pick, transport and place bricks. The system was particularly developed for the Mohamed Bin Zayed International Robotics Challenge (MBZIRC), where Challenge 2 consisted of building a wall cooperatively with multiple UAVs. However, our approach is more general and extensible to other multi-UAV applications involving physical interaction, like package delivery. We present not only our results in the final stage of MBZIRC, but also our simulations and field experiments throughout the previous months to the competition, where we tuned our system and assessed its performance.

This paper presents the design, modeling and control of a fully actuated aerial robot for infrastructure contact inspection as well as its localization system. Health assessment of transport infrastructure involves measurements with sensors in contact with the bridge and tunnel surfaces and the installation of monitoring sensing devices at specific points. The design of the aerial robot presented in the paper includes a 3DoF lightweight arm with a sensorized passive joint which can measure the contact force to regulate the force applied with the sensor on the structure. The aerial platform has been designed with tilted propellers to be fully actuated, achieving independent attitude and position control. It also mounts a “docking gear” to establish full contact with the infrastructure during the inspection, minimizing the measurement errors derived from the motion of the aerial platform and allowing full contact with the surface regardless of its condition (smooth, rough, ...). The localization system of the aerial robot uses multi-sensor fusion of the measurements of a topographic laser sensor on the ground and a tracking camera and inertial sensors on-board the aerial robot, to be able to fly under the bridge deck or close to the bridge pillars where GNSS satellite signals are not available. The paper also presents the modeling and control of the aerial robot. Validation experiments of the localization system and the control system, and with the aerial robot inspecting a real bridge are also included.

Article number 9291382 A redundant fast prototyping autopilot solution for unmanned aerial systems has been developed and successfully tested outdoors. While its low-level backbone is executed in a Raspberry Pi R 3 + NAVIO2 R with a backup autopilot, the computational power of an Intel R NUC mini-computer is employed to implement complex functionalities directly in Simulink R , thus including in-flight debugging, tuning and monitoring. Altogether, the presented tool provides a flexible and user-friendly high-level environment with enhanced computational capabilities, which drastically reduces the prototyping timespans of complex algorithms –between 50% and 75%, according to our long and proven experience in aerial robotics–, while preventing incidents thanks to its redundant design with a human-in-the-loop pilot on the reliable PX4. Three typical outdoor cases are carried out for validation in real-life scenarios, all mounted in a DJI c F550 platform. Full integration results and telemetry for more than 50 hours of outdoor flight tests are provided. Ministerio de Economía, Industria y Competitividad DPI2017-89790-R Programa Horizonte 2020. Unión Europea 779411 Programa Horizonte 2020. Unión Europea 871479

This paper presents a UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle) with intrinsic safety which can interact with people and obstacles while flying in an indoor environment in an autonomous way. A system description including mechanical features, the design of the external protective case, electrical connections and the communication using the Robot Operating System (ROS) between the different devices is presented. Then, the dynamic model of the aerial system taking into account the protective case, the local positioning algorithm (Hector SLAM) and the control models implemented are also described. Different experimental re-sults, which include simulation in Gazebo and real flights are shown to verify the positioning system developed. Two additional experiments have also been tested to validate two emergency safety systems in case of a failure in the position esti-mation is detected.

This paper is about an application of a method based on the ECIES (Elliptic Curve Integrated Encryption Scheme) to improve the security against malicious attacks of the UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) communications system. This system is focused on improving the security conditions in extreme situations and preventing the aircraft for man-made incidents and cyber attacks. The paper briefly describes the different attacks that can affect to the operation of UAVs and the security methods that, nowadays, are used to guarantee the security during the operations. Moreover, it presents a solution to a strong vulnerability detected in the classical scheme used in UAV. This scheme uses ROS (Robot Operating System) as the core of the communication system to interconnect different devices and nodes in this paper, it is demonstrated that if an Intruder is able to enter in the local network of the UAV system, he/she is also able to impersonate the GCS (Ground Control Station) of the UAV and take control of it leading to an undesirable maneuver or even a dangerous crash against a building or a person. The security system proposed to avoid this consists of a simplified method based on ECIES sending packets, between UAV and GCS, which uses ECDSA (Elliptic Curve Digital Signature) and are ciphered in RSA (Rivest–Shamir–Adleman). Thus, it is possible to guarantee that the high level computer of the UAV is able to identify the identity of their GCS and prevent of being commanded by an unauthorized Intruder. Both, the vulnerability and the solution proposed have been experimentally tested and validated through software-in-the-loop simulations and in a outdoor scenario using a small UAV.

This paper presents a robotic system using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for bridge-inspection tasks that require physical contact between the aerial platform and the bridge surfaces, such as beam-deflection analysis or measuring crack depth with an ultrasonic sensor. The proposed system takes advantage of the aerodynamic ceiling effect that arises when the multirotor gets close to the bridge surface. Moreover, this paper describes how a UAV can be used as a sensor that is able to fly and touch the bridge to take measurements during an inspection by contact. A practical application of the system involving the measurement of a bridge&rsquo, s beam deflection using a laser tracking station is also presented. In order to validate our system, experiments on two different bridges involving the measurement of the deflection of their beams are shown.

The proximity between the multirotor blades and the environmental obstacles restricts the application of aerial manipulators in inspection tasks due to the risk of impacts, the limitation in the reach of the arm, and the physical interactions. This paper presents a long reach aerial manipulator consisting of a hexarotor platform equipped with a 2-DOF compliant joint arm attached at the tip of a one-meter-length link in passive pendulum configuration. The arm integrates magnetic encoders for force/torque estimation-control based on joint deflection, a range sensor in the forearm link for measuring the distance to the contact point, and a camera for visual inspection. A 2-DOF wearable exoskeleton interface has been developed, allowing the teleoperation of the arm with visual feedback in a more intuitive way. The paper also covers the kinematics and dynamics of the aerial manipulator, including the dynamics of the flexible long reach link. The developed system has been evaluated in testbench and in outdoor flight tests.

The inspection of bridges and other infrastructure with UAVs when the sensors need to be in contact with the surface (i.e. ultrasound for crack inspection or reflector prism for beam deflection) is a great challenge due to the coupling which occurs between the aerial and the inspection problems. This paper presents a new design of a multirotor UAV that can be used in some of these applications to eliminate the coupling and to be able to carry out the inspection by contact in a more effective way. The proposed solution uses the so-called ceiling effect to maintain in contact a specially designed aerial platform to the ceiling. So, the coupling disappears because the multirotor is still in contact with the ceiling in a fixed position while performing inspection. Moreover, the presented results show that making use of the ceiling effect also improved the maximum flight time of the platform. The solution is presented with experimental results in a test stand and flight tests representing a bridge inspection application (Fig. 1). A video of the experiments is also included.

This paper analyzes the ground effect in multirotors, that is, the change in the thrust generated by the rotors when flying close to the ground due to the interaction of the rotor airflow with the ground surface. This effect is well known in single-rotor helicopters but has been assumed erroneously to be similar for multirotors in many cases in the literature. In this paper, the ground effect for multirotors is characterized with experimental tests in several cases and the partial ground effect, a situation in which one or some of the rotors of the multirotor (but not all) are under the ground effect, is also characterized. The influence of the different cases of ground effect in multirotor control is then studied with several control approaches in simulation and validated with experiments in a test bench and with outdoor flights. European Commission H2020-2014-644271 Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad DPI2014-59383-C2-1-R, DPI2015-71524-R

This paper presents a robotic system using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for bridge-inspection tasks that require physical contact between the aerial platform and the bridge surfaces, such as beam-deflection analysis or measuring crack depth with an ultrasonic sensor. The proposed system takes advantage of the aerodynamic ceiling effect that arises when the multirotor gets close to the bridge surface. Moreover, this paper describes how a UAV can be used as a sensor that is able to fly and touch the bridge to take measurements during an inspection by contact. A practical application of the system involving the measurement of a bridge’s beam deflection using a laser tracking station is also presented. In order to validate our system, experiments on two different bridges involving the measurement of the deflection of their beams are shown. This article is available also here:https://zenodo.org/record/2633659#.Xi8Aovbrvjo &nbsp