Autonomous Inspection of a Containment Vessel using a Micro Aerial Vehicle

In this work, we address the design, estimation, planning, control, and mapping problems to allow a small scale quadrotor to autonomously inspect the interior of a Containment Vessel (CV) test fixture, using on-board lighting, computation and sensing. We demonstrate a fully autonomous, 160 cm tip-to-tip, 236 gram Micro Aerial Vehicle (MAV) performing a complex flight mission inside of a dark test fixture that was built from a scale model of a CV. The proposed solution opens up new ways to inspect nuclear power plants and has the potential to support nuclear decommissioning, which is well known to be a dangerous, long, and tedious process. Experimental results show the ability to navigate under dripping water conditions and inside a completely dark, full-scale CV test fixture while concurrently avoiding known and unknown obstacles.