In recent years, commercial drone made a great success as a powerful personal photograph machine. Meanwhile, the demand of using drone for remote inspection is growing in various application. It requires the drone has excellent autonomous navigation ability in those GPS-denied dense environments. Besides, a proper interaction interface is desired for displaying 3D mapping and decide spatial flying tasks. However, these functions are not achieved in current commercial drone. As a result, we developed an autonomous drone system with Augmented Reality (AR) interface to do inspection work remotely.

In this thesis, we defined a drone product for Electrical& Mechanical infrastructure’s inspection remotely. It can fly autonomous to the desired inspection point and collect aerial data....[ Read more ]

In recent years, commercial drone made a great success as a powerful personal photograph machine. Meanwhile, the demand of using drone for remote inspection is growing in various application. It requires the drone has excellent autonomous navigation ability in those GPS-denied dense environments. Besides, a proper interaction interface is desired for displaying 3D mapping and decide spatial flying tasks. However, these functions are not achieved in current commercial drone. As a result, we developed an autonomous drone system with Augmented Reality (AR) interface to do inspection work remotely.

In this thesis, we defined a drone product for Electrical& Mechanical infrastructure’s inspection remotely. It can fly autonomous to the desired inspection point and collect aerial data. The human operators can interact with the drone via an AR interface remotely. We evaluate its performance in indoor space by comparing with inspection of manual flying drone. A user study on interface is conducted to evaluate its performance on 3D objects manipulation. The system shows advantages in remote inspection with spatial tasks interaction.

For commercial usage, we define the system as a standardized inspection drone product. Our target customers are those E&M service agents in Asia. They can inspect any infrastructure easily, safely, and remotely by using our product.

Keywords: autonomous navigation, human-drone interaction, augmented reality