Automation has come knocking at the door of the world of aircraft maintenance. The general trend shows that the total aircraft fleet size of the world increases in contrast to the number of technicians, which decreases. Therefore, the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Center (NLR) laun
...
Automation has come knocking at the door of the world of aircraft maintenance. The general trend shows that the total aircraft fleet size of the world increases in contrast to the number of technicians, which decreases. Therefore, the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Center (NLR) launched a project and setup called Leading Edge Scanner (LES) to automate technician performed inspections on aircraft for partial or total replacement of this service. Automated three-dimensional (3D) reconstruction of known or unknown objects requires robots and sensors. The LES, a robotic arm, will automatically detect and classify anomalies on aircraft components. As several images from different viewpoints are needed to reconstruct a 3D computerized object, a view planning strategy is required to find the Next-Best-View (NBV). The challenging problem of finding the NBV has been studied since the 1980s.