Enabling Aerial Close-Proximity and Contact Sensing for Inspection of Industrial Infrastructure

During routine operations, aircraft are subject to events that require detailed visual inspection (DVI) to determine their airworthiness before returning to flight status. Examples include lightning strikes, hail damage, and wingtip collisions. DVIs are time-consuming and require inspectors to work in hazardous conditions on lifts or walking on top of the aircraft. In some cases, aircraft may need to be ferried to a maintenance facility with the proper personnel and equipment. For a typical US airline such downtime can cost up to $100M annually in lost revenue. An autonomous small unmanned aircraft system (sUAS) that can fly around the aircraft to collect imagery and other sensor data that inspectors can use to make airworthiness decisions will increase inspection safety, reduce labor costs, and improve the bottom line of airlines. Near Earth Autonomy has developed a prototype sUAS-based DVI system and demonstrated its ability to autonomously navigate around large aircraft. It uses real-time laser-visual odometry and mapping technology for navigation in environments without GPS or any special infrastructure. The operation is fully autonomous: the drone takes off, flies around the aircraft to collect images, and lands at the take-off location. Autonomy solves 3 critical aspects of aircraft inspection: (1) Safety: an autonomous sUAS is guided much more precisely than with manual flight, protecting personnel and assets; (2) Positional image information images: the sUAS knows exactly where each picture is taken from and what areas on the aircraft the images cover; and (3) Speed: the autonomous flight can be fast, thus decreasing DVI time. In Phase II-E we propose to employ technologies developed in Phase II to adapt a sUAS-based inspection system to conduct DVI of commercial aircraft. While the long-term goal remains on contact inspection, adapting the tool to perform DVI will shorten the time to market and allow us to address an emerging market with known needs.

The system Near Earth Autonomy is developing in this program is applicable to NASA’s initiative H10.02, Autonomous Operations Technologies for Ground and Launch Systems. It specifically supports the deployment of automated/autonomous inspection, maintenance, and repair. Currently, these technologies are being integrated and tested at the Advanced Ground Systems Maintenance Integrated Health Management Architecture, deployed at Kennedy Space Center (KSC). In the future, the system can also be used for the inspection of space structures.

The benefits of reducing scheduled and unscheduled downtime in commercial aircraft fleets presents significant savings. Unscheduled downtime costs airline operators an estimated $10,000/hour in lost revenue. The deployment of the sUAS-based detailed visual inspection system will result in a safer, faster inspection capability that is not available in the commercial market today.

This is a mature technology (TRL 7) — the realistic path in is usually NASA's Technology Transfer Program: licensing an existing NASA patent, or a Space Act Agreement to use NASA facilities/expertise directly. NASA also runs a startup licensing program with no upfront fee for companies formed to commercialize a specific NASA technology.

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