Realizing the Aerial Robotic Worker for Inspection Operations

This report overviews a set of recent contributions in the field of path planning that were developed to enable the realization of the autonomous aerial robotic worker for inspection operations. The specific algorithmic contributions address several fundamental challenges of robotic inspection and exploration, and specifically those of optimal coverage planning given an a priori known model of the structure to be inspected, full coverage, optimized and fast inspection path planning, as well as efficient exploration of completely unknown environments and structures. All of the developed path planners support both holonomic and nonholonomic systems, and respect the on-board sensor model and constraints. An overview of the achieved results, followed by an integrating architecture in order to enable fully autonomous and highly-efficient infrastructure inspection in both known and unknown environments.