Development of a Single Page Application (SPA) Portal for Interaction, Control and Data Visualization for Autonomous Drone Missions for Radiographic Inspection of Wind Turbine Blades (Applicable to Swarming Missions)

Recent developments in UAVs have led to a new generation of mission planning and direction interfaces, which are aimed at simplifying complex autonomous behaviours. However, existing interfaces do not concurrently provide ROS2 support, the services of a user-friendly and highly reliable web-based application and the capability to send commands. The thesis project has been developed at the SpectX company and aims to combine the most powerful elements of the current state of the art, implementing innovations to improve the usability for remote swarm control. Many existing systems currently only allow the visualization and management of data via dashboards. The interface developed, besides displaying telemetry and data received in real time from the sensors, allows to manage the mission lifecycle control of the swarm and to interact individually with each drone, sending commands such as takeoff, RTL and landing. It enables the user to choose between autonomous mission mode, previously setting the mission configuration by the user, and manual mode, setting waypoints for the path of the drone. In particular, the application is designed for the inspection of wind farms and define the mission configuration for the inspection of specific wind turbines by modifying wind turbine parameters such as GNSS coordinates, hub height, turbine radius and coordinates of points of interest. The interface is web-based and has several views to facilitate the user experience. Furthermore, user permissions can be defined in the future. The front-end was developed using React, which is a JavaScript library used for Single Page Applications, due to its efficiency in handling the user interface and dynamic content. The backend of the application is based on ROS2, using services, actions and topics. The application interacts with several ROS2 packages used to implement autonomous navigation, precise localization for drones used for inspection of industrial assets. The Flask framework is used in the backend, as it acts as a translator layer mediating between the React frontend and the ROS2 system. The proposed application is built for real-world operations. The features developed so far have been tested in a simulation environment using Gazebo Garden with PX4 SITL. For future developments, the application will be tested in the field using physical drones in order to evaluate its performance in real-life conditions. This process will be made possible through the support of the hardware-in-the-loop approach.