Inspection of aircraft wing panels using unmanned aerial vehicles

Citation

Tzitzilonis V, Malandrakis K, Zanotti Fragonara L, et al., (2019) Inspection of aircraft wing panels using unmanned aerial vehicles. Sensors, Volume 19, Issue 8, 2019, Article number 1824

Abstract

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.

Description

Software Description

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Github

Keywords

Non-Destructive Testing, ultraviolet light, automated inspection, defects detection, UAV, image processing

DOI

Rights

Attribution 4.0 International

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