Mastering Complexity for Indoor Inspection Drone Development

Drones have successfully been used for many outdoor uses, notably inspection of buildings. Using drones for indoor inspection of buildings raises new design challenges, in particular with respect to Building Information Modeling and indoor navigation issues since satellite-based localization does not work inside a building. The authors of this paper advocate for using a Systems Engineering approach to address these design challenges. The paper surveys systems engineering methods published in the literature and addresses a method adapted to complex systems which are subject to evolving environment such as drones for indoor inspection of buildings. The chosen method provides several views of the system from a global perspective including mission and operational analyses, to more specific perspectives including requirement, functional, logical and physical analyses.