A framework for aerial inspection of siltation in waterways
Hamza Anwar, Abubakr Muhammad, Karsten Berns
Abstract
Silt accumulation and sedimentation in canal beds leads to deterioration of watercourses over time. Every year a forced closure of the canals in the Indus basin is inevitable for canal cleaning, entailing a very large scale and costly operation. Silt removal precision is prone to inefficiencies due to subjective decision making in the cleaning process. In this paper, we lay out a theoretical framework to map the semi-structured (emptied) canal bed terrains with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system for quantitative inspection of deposited silt. The study employs Gaussian process regression on sampled points to determine a continuous distribution of silt surface, thereby, predicting the volume of silt on canal bed. Our theoretical analysis builds upon certain mathematical bounds on the variance of estimated volume, while explicitly considering localization error and sensor noise. Essentially, we setup a framework for studying how tolerable are the process and measurement uncertainties, while achieving a desired accuracy in silt profile and corresponding volume. We demonstrate the regression results in simulations as well as lab-scaled-model (LMS151 laser scanner) with different sets of parameters. Volume estimation is verified practically and mathematical performance limits are proposed in established aerial canal inspection system.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{iros2015_aframeworkforaer,
title = {A framework for aerial inspection of siltation in waterways},
author = {Hamza Anwar and Abubakr Muhammad and Karsten Berns},
booktitle = {IROS 2015},
year = {2015}
}