Autonomous UAV Navigation and Path Planning for Civil Infrastructures Inspection and Structural Health Monitoring

The problem of path planning is a crucial area of exploration in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that seek to find the best route from the origin to the destination. Despite a large body of research in this field, issues persist in identifying and locating targets due to the high mobility of UAVs. To address these issues, optimal decisions must be made for mission-critical operations undertaken by UAVs. The primary objective of this thesis is to examine and evaluate the path planning techniques used in UAVs over the past several years. Furthermore, the study aims to evaluate the performance of UAV path planning in a simulated 3D environment as a preliminary step towards larger implementation for civil infrastructures and real world applications.The thesis initially presents a broad classification of path planning techniques followed by a comprehensive synthesis of each algorithm with critical assessment of existing work. The study then proceeds to explore the effectiveness of autonomous UAV path planning in a simulated environment using two different test scenarios with varying levels of environmental complexity. The simulation programming was accomplished using a meta-operating system library named Robot Operating System (ROS), and three path planning algorithms from the OMPL library were selected to assess their performance in terms of planning time, path length, and obstacle avoidance. The results highlight that the efficacy of the algorithms is heavily dependent on the application and the environment in which they are employed. Moreover, the approach adopted in this study can be easily implemented in a real-world environment by inputting the path results into the microcontroller of a UAV. The insights offered by this study serve to enhance the reader's understanding of UAV path planning techniques and their performance in varying environments.

Level thesis:degree_level

Master's Degree

Year dc:date.issued

2023

Author dc:creator

• Banik, Munni Rani

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Moustafa, Mohamed A. M.A.M.

Committee member dc:contributor.committeemember

• Seylabi, Elnaz Esmaeilzadeh E.E.S.

• Autonomous Motion Planning
• Civil Infrastructure Inspection
• Path Planning Algorithm
• Robot Operating System
• Structural Health Monitoring
• Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Statement dc:rights

• Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 United States

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11714/8544

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarwolf.unr.edu:11714/8544