Abstract
Current railway tunnel inspections rely on expert operators performing a visual examination of the entire infrastructure and manually annotating encountered defects. Automatizing the inspection and maintenance task of such critical and aging infrastructures has the potential to decrease the associated costs and risks. Contributing to this aim, the present work describes an aerial robotic solution designed to perform autonomous inspections of tunnel-like infrastructures. The proposed robotic system is equipped with visual and thermal sensors and uses an inspection-driven path planning algorithm to generate a path that maximizes the quality of the gathered data in terms of photogrammetry goals while optimizing the surface coverage and the total trajectory length. The performance of the planning algorithm is demonstrated in simulation against state-of-the-art methods and a wall-following inspection trajectory. Results of a real inspection test conducted in a railway tunnel are also presented, validating the whole system operation.
Highlights
The aging of the existing infrastructure [1] and the increasing necessity of building new ones have set a lower limit, around 3.9%, of the GDP corresponding to EU member states for financing infrastructure-related activities [2]
This paper proposes a hardware and software selection for automated tunnel inspections that have been validated through simulation and real experiments
The simulation experiments highlighted the capacity of the proposed method to perform a close visual inspection while exploring the previously unknown tunnel environment
Summary
The aging of the existing infrastructure [1] and the increasing necessity of building new ones have set a lower limit, around 3.9%, of the GDP corresponding to EU member states for financing infrastructure-related activities [2]. Multiple robotic solutions that aim to facilitate inspection and maintenance procedures have emerged [4,5,6,7]. This growing interest is fueled by the potential of maintaining the same performance of traditional methods while increasing the time and cost-efficiency of the operation and mitigating the risks. Focusing on tunnel-like infrastructures, the particularities of their grounds that are usually uneven, potentially wet and, as in the case of railway tunnels, contain tracks and other obstacles, limit the number of solutions that consider ground robots for the inspection task [13,14]. The use of flying robots as an inspection tool is continuously increasing due to their capacity to traverse 3D space and quickly reach high and difficult to access areas [15,16,17,18,19]
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