Inspecting Interior Built Environments Using Augmented Reality-Based Autonomous Robot

During the past several years, there has been an increasing interest in deploying mobile robots to inspect building structures. Augmented Reality (AR), which can impose digital information into the real working space, has been proved to be effective in providing most relevant information in an intuitive manner. Combining the strength of these two technologies, this paper proposed an Augmented Reality-based autonomous robotic inspection system for interior built environments. A novel path-planning optimization algorithm was also developed to improve the success of the main goal of the robot using specialized sensors when available. The algorithm can also avoid obstacles and cycles in the search, and handling errors. Experimentation on the effectiveness of this algorithm and system was conducted and the preliminary results are discussed in this paper.