Automated Surface Defects Acquisition System of Civil Aircraft Based on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

A large amount of maintenance work is needed in the whole life of civil aircraft, of which visual inspection as a basic and effective inspection means occupies a large proportion in the maintenance work. In order to reduce the workload of maintenance engineers in the future maintenance work, shorten working hours, and improve inspection quality. In this paper, we propose a method of applying the multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to the civil aircraft visual inspection work. Furthermore, we proposed a method to calibrate the UAV flight route by identifying the ArUco markers. After several test flights, the UAV equipped with a high-resolution camera could accomplish the visual inspection work automatically.