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Inspection Operations Using an Aerial Robot Powered-over-Tether by a Ground Vehicle

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Advances in Visual Computing (ISVC 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 9474))

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Abstract

Within this paper, the utilization of an aerial robot that is powered-over-tether by a ground robot in order to execute long-endurance infrastructure inspection operations is described. Details on the key-concept of the Power-over-Tether system with the power bank of the aerial robot now being located on the ground vehicle are provided. To allow smooth flight of the aerial vehicle, a long power cable is wound onto a custom-developed base which is capable of releasing and retracting in a controlled manner. This design is exploited via a special controller that handles the coordinated motion of the two robots. Finally, a structural inspection planner is integrated into the system and benefitting by the on-board perception and mapping capabilities of the aerial robot autonomous \(3\text {D}\) reconstruction of the desired objects is achieved. The overall framework is evaluated using experimental studies relevant to infrastructure inspection operations.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Patras, Patras, Greece

    Lida Zikou, Christos Papachristos & Anthony Tzes

  2. University of Nevada, Reno, Reno, USA

    Kostas Alexis

Authors
  1. Lida Zikou
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  2. Christos Papachristos
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  3. Kostas Alexis
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  4. Anthony Tzes
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kostas Alexis .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Nevada, Reno, Nevada, USA

    George Bebis

  2. NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California, USA

    Richard Boyle

  3. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

    Bahram Parvin

  4. Desert Research Institute, Reno, Nevada, USA

    Darko Koracin

  5. University of Houston, Houston, Texas, USA

    Ioannis Pavlidis

  6. IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York, USA

    Rogerio Feris

  7. Purdue University, West Lafayette, Indiana, USA

    Tim McGraw

  8. Side Effects Software, Santa Monica, California, USA

    Mark Elendt

  9. The DiVE, Durham, North Carolina, USA

    Regis Kopper

  10. Texas A&M University, College Station, Texas, USA

    Eric Ragan

  11. Kent State University, Kent, Ohio, USA

    Zhao Ye

  12. Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, California, USA

    Gunther Weber

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Zikou, L., Papachristos, C., Alexis, K., Tzes, A. (2015). Inspection Operations Using an Aerial Robot Powered-over-Tether by a Ground Vehicle. In: Bebis, G., et al. Advances in Visual Computing. ISVC 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9474. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27857-5_41

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27857-5_41

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-27856-8

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-27857-5

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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