Motivation
Traditional pre-flight inspections of commercial airliners are labor-intensive, time-consuming, and prone to human error, often requiring workers to manually access hard-to-reach areas to identify dents and other defects. This process can take up to four hours, resulting in costly downtime for airlines, with potential losses averaging $10,000 per hour in missed earnings. Implementing drone-enabled inspection systems can significantly reduce inspection time to under 30 minutes while increasing accuracy and enabling remote analysis of high-resolution images, ensuring quicker detection of issues such as cracks, popped rivets, and leaks.
a manual pre-flight inspection
Problem Statement
The objective of our project is to develop a drone-based inspection system capable of accurately detecting dents as small as 1mm in depth and 1cm in width from a distance of 2-4 meters. To ensure reliable performance, our algorithm must be robust to varying aircraft types, illumination conditions, and surface textures.
a plane wing with dents on it