Aerial robotic operations: multi-environment cooperative inspection & construction crack autonomous repair

Aerial robots are widely sought after in a large number of applications. A prominent example of such applications is disaster management, where robots can play crucial and innovative roles in post-disaster rescue, search, and manipulation to offer a safe and fast response. The research described in this dissertation concentrates on two key aspects of this application, namely, multi-environment cooperative inspection (Part I) and construction crack autonomous repair (Part II). Part I is on building an inspection framework using two aerial robots of different sizes. Part II is on developing a construction crack autonomous repair scheme using a Delta manipulator and an aerial platform. Among the techniques related to the described research are robotic hardware design, localization, flight control design, object detection, navigation, and robotic manipulation. They are all employed to achieve the main research objectives of this dissertation.