Inspection of Aircraft Wing Panels Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Sensors

Kevin Forster¹  Antonios Tsourdos²  Konstantinos Malandrakis²  Vasileios Tzitzilonis²  NicolasP. Avdelidis²  Luca Zanotti Fragonara³  JoseAngel Gonzalez Domingo³ 

[1] Airbus UK, Broughton CH4 0DR, UK;Centre for Autonomous and Cyber-Physical Systems, Cranfield University, Cranfield MK43 0AL, UK;Centre for Structures, Assembly and Intelligent Automation, Cranfield MK43 0AL, UK;

关键词: Non-Destructive Testing;    ultraviolet light;    automated inspection;    defects detection;    UAV;    image processing;   

DOI  :  10.3390/s19081824

来源: DOAJ

【 摘 要 】

In large civil aircraft manufacturing, a time-consuming post-production process is the non-destructive inspection of wing panels. This work aims to address this challenge and improve the defects’ detection by performing automated aerial inspection using a small off-the-shelf multirotor. The UAV is equipped with a wide field-of-view camera and an ultraviolet torch for implementing non-invasive imaging inspection. In particular, the UAV is programmed to perform the complete mission and stream video, in real-time, to the ground control station where the defects’ detection algorithm is executed. The proposed platform was mathematically modelled in MATLAB/SIMULINK in order to assess the behaviour of the system using a path following method during the aircraft wing inspection. In addition, two defect detection algorithms were implemented and tested on a dataset containing images obtained during inspection at Airbus facilities. The results show that for the current dataset the proposed methods can identify all the images containing defects.

【 授权许可】

Unknown