Motion planning in robotized sensor networks for aircraft rivet inspection

This paper proposes a new robotized mobile sensor network platform to conduct aircraft rivet inspection and addresses the motion planning problem involved. Due to the specific movement characteristics of the mobile robot, the path, or the rivet sequence, should enable each mobile robot to realize the localization-and-reposition process. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm to extend our previous single robot path planning algorithm into the multiple robots version. This algorithm first decomposes the overall rivet set into multiple disjoint subsets based on a graph partitioning algorithm. Then for each subset, we apply our find-crawler-TSP algorithm to generate the path. Simulation results validate the proposed algorithm