Autonomous UAV Pipeline Near-proximity Inspection via Disturbance-Aware Predictive Visual Servoing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a disturbance-aware visual servoing control framework for autonomous UAV pipeline inspection, combining predictive modeling and Kalman filtering to improve accuracy and robustness in complex environments.

Contribution

It develops a unified predictive control model with disturbance estimation, enabling reliable autonomous inspection over unknown terrain and under environmental uncertainties.

Findings

Reduces pipeline orientation RMSE by over 52% in real tests.

Achieves successful inspection in wind and bend scenarios where baseline fails.

Validated in high-fidelity simulations and real-world experiments.

Abstract

Reliable pipeline inspection is critical to safe energy transportation, but is constrained by long distances, complex terrain, and risks to human inspectors. Unmanned aerial vehicles provide a flexible sensing platform, yet reliable autonomous inspection remains challenging. This paper presents an autonomous quadrotor near-proximity pipeline inspection framework for three-dimensional scenarios based on image-based visual servoing model predictive control (VMPC). A unified predictive model couples quadrotor dynamics with image feature kinematics, enabling direct image-space prediction within the control loop. To address low-rate visual updates, measurement noise, and environmental uncertainties, an extended-state Kalman filtering scheme with image feature prediction (ESKF-PRE) is developed, and the estimated lumped disturbances are incorporated into the VMPC prediction model, yielding the ESKF-PRE-VMPC framework. A terrain-adaptive velocity design is introduced to maintain the desired cruising speed while generating vertical velocity references over unknown terrain slopes without prior terrain information. The framework is validated in high-fidelity Gazebo simulations and real-world experiments. In real-world tests, the proposed method reduces RMSE by 52.63% and 75.04% in pipeline orientation and lateral deviation in the image, respectively, for straight-pipeline inspection without wind, and successfully completes both wind-disturbance and bend-pipeline tasks where baseline method fails. An open-source nano quadrotor is modified for indoor experimentation.