Unmanned aerial vehicles are a modern day solution for reducing the time of inspections. This work aims to address the difficulties of using a UAV to inspect aircraft structures. Challenges such as non-uniform heating, low spatial resolution, and environmental noise cause some difficulties for defect detection and characterisation. Contrary to this, mounting sensors onto a UAV’s will further increase the noise, due to the motion, vibrations and sequence mismatching. Methods to tackle stabilisation and indoor localisation are used by utilising a Vicon system, this aims to increase the accuracy of the captured data when inspecting without GPS i.e. inspecting indoors. Other than active thermography, various methods were trialled to locate defects, passive thermography, photogrammetry and RGB image processing.
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