Unmanned aerial vehicles for autonomous operations

The global inspection industry is trending towards the unmanned system, for example, Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV), Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and Unmanned Surface Vehicle (USV), which are mostly teleoperated by a human operator. However, a skilled human pilot is an expensive asset and also in limited supply. For these reasons, fully autonomous navigation in a complex urban environment is still considered a challenge for any Global Positioning System (GPS)-based feedback system. The Singapore institute of higher learning has developed a new urban navigation solution which uses the tightly coupled Vision-Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-ultra wide band-Inertial fusion system to achieve a robust localisation system in a complex urban environment. The estimation of the pose is in the near-ground-truth level metric scale. The short-term obstacle mapping takes the fusion from the short-range dense stereo output and long-range sparse LiDAR output to have a robust, complementary measurement system for navigation. The automated path planning makes use of the detected plane feature with LiDAR for automated guided trajectory construction. The actual trajectory will be planned dynamically on the fly with fix-distance spacing away from the building. The technology is primarily developed for the autonomous operation of UAVs. It has great potential for applications such as building inspection, off-shore structure inspection, ship inspection, plane inspection, mega-structure inspection and urban aerial reconnaissance for finding hostile targets in buildings. Partners interested in licensing or commercial agreements with technical assistance are being sought by the technology provider.