Abstract
This paper describes the design, development and field tests of an aerial vehicle for semi-autonomous inspection of sewer pipes. This vehicle is able to localize and align itself with respect to the longitudinal axis of the pipe, and to keep a predefined height over the water. The human operator only needs to send high-level commands to move the vehicle forward or backward along the pipe, and this navigation is then done safely in an autonomous manner. We tested our system in a realistic mock-up scenario provided by a city water management company. Our field tests show that the platform is operational and fulfill the requirements for sewer inspections.
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Acknowledgements
This work has been developed in the Spanish SAAIC project and it has received funding from CTA and CDTI. It has also been funded by ARM-EXTEND in the Spanish RD plan (DPI2017-89790-R). We would also like to thank Rafael Salmoral for his support during flying tests.
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Castaño, A.R., Romero, H., Capitán, J., Andrade, J.L., Ollero, A. (2020). Development of a Semi-autonomous Aerial Vehicle for Sewerage Inspection. In: Silva, M., Luís Lima, J., Reis, L., Sanfeliu, A., Tardioli, D. (eds) Robot 2019: Fourth Iberian Robotics Conference. ROBOT 2019. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1092. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35990-4_7
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