In recent years, autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has seen rapid advancements, significantly improving operational efficiency and mitigating risks associated with manual tasks in domains such as industrial inspection, agricultural monitoring, and search-and-rescue missions. Despite these developments, existing UAV inspection systems encounter two critical challenges: limited reliability in complex, unstructured, and GNSS-denied environments, and a pronounced dependency on skilled operators. To overcome these limitations, this study presents a LiDAR-based UAV inspection system employing a dual-phase workflow: human-in-the-loop inspection and autonomous inspection. During the human-in-the-loop phase, untrained pilots are supported by autonomous obstacle avoidance, enabling them to generate 3D maps, specify inspection points, and schedule tasks. Inspection points are then optimized using the Traveling Salesman Problem (TSP) to create efficient task sequences. In the autonomous phase, the quadrotor autonomously executes the planned tasks, ensuring safe and efficient data acquisition. Comprehensive field experiments conducted in various environments, including slopes, landslides, agricultural fields, factories, and forests, confirm the system's reliability and flexibility. Results reveal significant enhancements in inspection efficiency, with autonomous operations reducing trajectory length by up to 40\% and flight time by 57\% compared to human-in-the-loop operations. These findings underscore the potential of the proposed system to enhance UAV-based inspections in safety-critical and resource-constrained scenarios.

Given the expansive scope of inspections in different environments, industries are in need of a mixed fleet of specialist robots that are tailored to these conditions. Our robot-agnostic solution enables industries to manage a mixed fleet of robots in different environments (incl. ATEX/IECEx Zone 1 areas) through one single interface. In this session, we will present a live-demo of autonomous inspection and delve into how these robots can be equipped with extensible sensors and skills that match your inspection needs. Join our webinar and watch robots perform inspection missions autonomously. What to look forward to in the webinar? 1. Live demo of inspection missions by our robot fleet including Spot, from Boston Dynamics, and ExR-2 from ExRobotics 2. The need for a mixed fleet of specialist robots and how you can manage them through a single interface 3. Learn about industrial use-cases and problems solved through autonomous robots 4. Best practices derived from 2 years of our experience in deploying 50+ robots in the brownfield industry with over 50,000 hours of deployment 5. Value added by autonomous inspections in terms of operational efficiency, workplace safety and cost effectiveness Be a part of the Webinar and learn how we push the boundaries of what is possible and extract the full potential of robots. About us: Energy Robotics provides an end-to-end, robot-agnostic software solution for autonomous inspections in capital-intensive industries such as oil & gas, chemical and energy.