An unmanned aerial vehicle-based system for large scale metrology applications

Different manufacturing environments, such as aerospace, automotive, shipbuilding, and railway, reveal their interest in large scale metrology (LSM) instruments, to provide support in assembly, alignment, inspection, and robot tracking tasks. Notwithstanding different levels of portability, the overall measurement procedure actually involves a direct interaction between the measuring equipment and the operator, as well as a strong dependence on human skills. This paper presents a novel metrological system, scaling down this interaction to a mission management task and aimed at making system performance uniform. The proposed architecture entrusts an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) with the task of carrying the sensor equipment and of moving the measuring probe. The design process of the proposed system is detailed and faced with a two-level approach. The first level is directed to identify the available start-up technology, its limitations and sensitivity to the design parameters, while the second level is focused on the experimental testing of a preliminary test-bed to investigate the overall system performance. An actual implementation of the proposed architecture is herein discussed, focusing on system feasibility and presenting some preliminary experimental results.