Realtime Localization and Estimation of Loads on Aircraft Wings from Depth Images

This paper deals with the development of a realtime structural health monitoring system for airframe structures to localize and estimate the magnitude of the loads causing deflections to the critical components, such as wings. To this end, a framework that is based on artificial neural networks is d...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Diyar Khalis Bilal, Mustafa Unel, Mehmet Yildiz, Bahattin Koc
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2020-06-01
Series:Sensors
Subjects:
Online Access:https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/20/12/3405
Description
Summary:This paper deals with the development of a realtime structural health monitoring system for airframe structures to localize and estimate the magnitude of the loads causing deflections to the critical components, such as wings. To this end, a framework that is based on artificial neural networks is developed where features that are extracted from a depth camera are utilized. The localization of the load is treated as a multinomial logistic classification problem and the load magnitude estimation as a logistic regression problem. The neural networks trained for classification and regression are preceded with an autoencoder, through which maximum informative data at a much smaller scale are extracted from the depth features. The effectiveness of the proposed method is validated by an experimental study performed on a composite unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) wing subject to concentrated and distributed loads, and the results obtained by the proposed method are superior when compared with a method based on Castigliano’s theorem.
ISSN:1424-8220