Author: Feng, Yurong
Title: A real-time object inspection system for unmanned aerial vehicles
Advisors: Wen, Chih-yung (ME)
Degree: M.Sc.
Year: 2020
Subject: Drone aircraft -- Automatic control
Embedded computer systems
Hong Kong Polytechnic University -- Dissertations
Department: Department of Mechanical Engineering
Pages: 74 pages : color illustrations
Language: English
Abstract: Visual inspections act as a foundation for maintenance of public facilities to preserve the proper and stable operation of facilities. Current methods for inspection public facilities are costly, lengthy and labor intensive. Nowadays, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) equipped with computer vision techniques provide a potential as a helpful tool for facility inspection. This study proposes an autonomous UAV system that detects and inspects specific facility. The system detects objects using a pre-trained deep learning model. We collect and generate a medium scale of images dataset and use it to train a set of object detection model. The best performance model integrated with a vision-based control path planning algorithm was examined on a physical UAV platform. Our system was able to successfully detect and inspect an object autonomously during flight test which validates our path planning algorithm. Detection performance was achieved by the detection algorithm's 93% accuracy in messy environment and the inference time of 2 seconds on a companion computer. Visual-servo path planning algorithm was justified in terms of the estimated objects position and dynamic characteristic of UAV.
Rights: All rights reserved
Access: restricted access

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Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://theses.lib.polyu.edu.hk/handle/200/10798