Autonomous Drone for Nuclear Power Plant Inspection

For our final year capstone project, my team and I build and programmed an autonomous drone system for a Nuclear Power Plant inspection task. The drone was flown in a drone lab at the University in a room full of obstacles which were not known apriori.

For this project, our team of 4 split ourselves such that I worked on the path planning, obstacle avoidance, and was in charge of the testing tuning of our drone and software parameters. I also was responsible of the adminstrative aspect.

The project was split up into 5 deliverables, starting from autonomous takeoff and landing, hovering on the spot, following a simple trajectory with no obstacles and finally autonomously navigating the environment to reach waypoints.

We used a realsense T265 for our visual odometry, a pixhawk flight controller and MAVROS, a library that enables us to receive telemetry from the pixhawk onto our ROS network. We used an onboard Jetson Nano for our computation. A lidar sensor was also added for altitude estimation. A color camera was used to perform obstacle detection.