Swarm enabled inspection of parallel structures through marker enabled path planning and IOT

The use of autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for applications such as exploration and surveillance have grown in popularity with the increase in UAV availability. With applications of exploration and surveillance in mind, and the knowledge of path finding and data exchange in a multi-UAV system, the focus of this research will be to use fiducial marks for path planning and data exchange. Binary square fiducial markers such as ArUco or AprilTag, alongside OpenCV algorithms, will be used to allow the UAV’s camera to detect fiducial markers and plot a course of navigation according to the data related to the identified marker. Structural damage inspection (Fig1) will be another application of this research where OpenCV and image processing techniques will be implemented to collect real-time valuable data. The data collected by the multi-UAV system will be collected and transmitted in real-time to the user as an application of Internet of Things (IoT).