Abstract
In recent years, many of the infrastructures have been exceeding their useful life, and intensive maintenance is required. In order to incorporate a UAV as an effective alternative to direct visual inspection, it has to visit all the inspecting points and take photos of them in proper resolution. This paper proposes a method for making a flight path that allows taking proper photos of target structures cost-effectively with mathematical programming technique. The proposed method first identifies the optimal viewpoints which cover all the inspecting points and satisfy the overlap ratio of photos. Then, the shortest cyclic path can be obtained to visit all the optimal points as the optimal flight plan. The numerical experiments showed the quantitative performance of the proposed method for planning and visualization of the optimized flight path.
