Spiral Trajectories for Building Inspection with Quadrotors

TL;DR

This paper introduces a method to generate smooth, Fourier series-based trajectories for quadrotors to efficiently inspect large buildings, ensuring complete coverage and smooth flight paths.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel approach that computes smooth, Fourier series trajectories from 2.5D building models for quadrotor inspection tasks.

Findings

Method is efficient in simulation

Performs well across different building shapes

Outperforms polynomial trajectory methods

Abstract

Inspection of large building is an important task since it can prevent material and human losses. A cheap and fast way to do the inspections is by sensors mounted on quadrotor vehicles. The challenge here is to compute a trajectory so that the building is completely observed while this same trajectory can be followed by the quadrotor in a smooth way. To address the problem, we propose a method that receives a 2.5D model of the target building and computes a smooth trajectory that can be followed by the quadrotor controller. The computed trajectory is a Fourier series that matches the desired behaviour. Our method has been tested in simulation and we have compared it against polynomial trajectories. Our result show that the method is efficient and can be applied to different building shapes.