Affordable, Miniature, and Coordinated Aerial Robot Team for Infrastructure Inspection
To keep the essential infrastructure such as bridges, dams and roads operating properly, routine inspection and maintenance are necessary. These tasks are often dependent on human power and requires a lot of time and effort. With the developments in robot technology, it is possible to reduce the time and effort spent at these tasks, especially the in the inspection part. The robots that are to be used for inspection need to have several features: First of all, they need to be able to obtain visuals of the inspection area in a fast and reliable manner. Furthermore, they need to climb at certain heights and conduct their mission in a stable manner. Unmanned air vehicles, or flying robots are good candidates that can satisfy these requirements. However, for flying robots to be efficiently used in inspection operations, they need to be utilized in teams, rather than as individual robots. The main reason for this is the exponential increase in time and effort when a single robot is employed to obtain images or videos of a certain site, compared to a team of robots. The main drawback of existing flying robot teams, both in industry and academia, is the difficulty in carrying these teams from point A to point B, due to their size, weight and the materials used in their construction. Since they are built using rigid materials, it is easy to damage their parts while carrying them. In addition, it is hard to contain them in small bags dur to their size and weight. Furthermore, their operational costs are large due to probable damages after a collision or a misusage. The novel aspect of this project is building a disposable flying robot team that can fill these mentioned gaps in the literature with their affordable, elastic and miniature bodies.The goal of this project is to design and manufacture a flying robot team consisting of 3 robots, to be used in infrastructure inspection.
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Bakır, A., Özbek, D., Abazari, A., Özcan, O. (2023). “SCoReR: Sensorized Collision Resilient Aerial Robot”, IEEE 6th International Conference on Soft Robotics (RoboSoft), 2023 (Under Review)