Rapid, High-Fidelity Aircraft Inspection Using Autonomous Aerial Systems

To maintain safe operation, aircraft are carefully inspected at regular intervals, or as needed. These inspections are time-consuming and pose risks to both people and aircraft as heavy machinery at considerable heights are involved. Aircraft operators, both defense and commercial, are increasingly considering using small Unmanned Aerial System (sUAS or “drones”) to fly around the aircraft and collect imagery to facilitate inspection of aircraft skin damage. Near Earth has developed a commercial sUAS prototype and autonomously navigated it around a C-17 aircraft to exhaustively image its upper-facing fuselage and wing surfaces in less than 15 minutes of flying.  The UAS uses our award-winning, real-time, high precision laser-visual odometry and mapping technology for navigation. Therefore, the UAS navigates in unstructured environment with no need for any external infrastructure for positioning and navigation.   The operation is fully autonomous: the drone takes off, locates the airplane to be inspected, navigates around it to collect images, and lands at the take-off location autonomously.  The autonomy provides for two critical aspects: 1) safety – an autonomous UAS is guided much more precisely than with manual flight,  and 2) ability to tag images with positional information – the UAS knows exactly where each picture is taken from and what areas on the aircraft the images are looking at.  In addition, the autonomous flight can be relatively fast, thus extending the aircraft coverage for a given UAS endurance.  An operator monitors the performance of the drone through a live graphical user interface on the ground station (a laptop or a tablet).  The collected images are analyzed by human inspectors or automated defect detection algorithms.  The images and/or semantically labeled defects are stored for later reference or future comparison. With the stringent pace of flight schedules in both commercial and defense sector, aircraft down-time costs accumulate significantly. This proposal requests funding to develop the business case of UAS-based military aircraft inspection through engagement with and flight demonstration to multiple Air Force units.  It is expected that both Air Force and Near Earth will learn and benefit from this direct exchange leading to product requirements tuned to specific Air Force concepts of operations, increased safety, greater “up-time”, and reduced costs.  Applications to civilian aircraft inspection are straightforward as they follow similar inspection patterns.