Donecle is a Toulouse-based aircraft manufacturer which develops autonomous aircraft inspection

UAV An unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV), commonly known as a drone, is an aircraft without any human pilot, crew, or passengers on board. UAVs are a component of an unmanned aircraft system (UAS), which includes adding a ground-based controller ...

s. The company offers single UAVs and swarms of UAVs to visually inspect the exterior of

airliner An airliner is a type of aircraft for transporting passengers and air cargo. Such aircraft are most often operated by airlines. Although the definition of an airliner can vary from country to country, an airliner is typically defined as an ...

s. Autonomous navigation of the UAVs is based on laser positioning technology. UAVs take pictures of the aircraft with

high resolution Image resolution is the detail an image holds. The term applies to digital images, film images, and other types of images. "Higher resolution" means more image detail. Image resolution can be measured in various ways. Resolution quantifies how cl ...

cameras.

Image processing An image is a visual representation of something. It can be two-dimensional, three-dimensional, or somehow otherwise feed into the visual system to convey information. An image can be an artifact, such as a photograph or other two-dimensiona ...

and machine learning algorithms analyse the images. The system then provides a diagnostic of the aircraft surface to a qualified inspector, who reviews the images and validates or refutes the provided analysis. The company works with airlines such as

Air France Industries Air France (; formally ''Société Air France, S.A.''), stylised as AIRFRANCE, is the flag carrier of France headquartered in Tremblay-en-France. It is a subsidiary of the Air France–KLM Group and a founding member of the SkyTeam global airl ...

KLM KLM Royal Dutch Airlines, legally ''Koninklijke Luchtvaart Maatschappij N.V.'' (literal translation: Royal Aviation Company Plc.), is the flag carrier airline of the Netherlands. KLM is headquartered in Amstelveen, with its hub at nearby Amste ...

and aircraft manufacturers such as

Dassault Aviation Dassault Aviation SA () is a French Aerospace manufacturer, manufacturer of military aircraft and business jets. It was founded in 1929 by Marcel Dassault, Marcel Bloch as Société des Avions Marcel Bloch or "MB". After World War II, Marc ...

and is one of the players in the field of aeronautical maintenance automation.

History

Background

Aircraft manufacturers, such as Airbus, Boeing and

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, and certification bodies, such as the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), require regular visual inspections of the entire external surface of the aircraft to assess the condition of their structures. About 80% of the required inspections are visual. All aircraft are visually inspected prior to each flight, as part of scheduled maintenance operations and after unplanned events such as a lightning strike,

hail storm Hail is a form of solid precipitation. It is distinct from ice pellets (American English "sleet"), though the two are often confused. It consists of balls or irregular lumps of ice, each of which is called a hailstone. Ice pellets generally fa ...

or other possible external damage. One possible solution to improve the traceability of these operations and reduce costs is the robotization of aeronautical maintenance and its visual inspections. In January 2013, the French research and development project Air-Cobot began to develop a collaborative mobile robot capable of inspecting an aircraft during maintenance operations. Carried out by the Akka Technologies group, this multi-partner project involved research laboratories and companies, including Airbus. In 2014, in partnership with the Bristol Robotics Laboratory, the British airline easyJet became interested in drones guided by technicians to reduce the inspection time of aircraft fuselages.

Foundation

After thirteen years in the design offices of the European aircraft manufacturer Airbus on the A400M and

A350 The Airbus A350 is a long-range, wide-body twin-engine jet airliner developed and produced by Airbus. The first A350 design proposed by Airbus in 2004, in response to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, would have been a development of the A330 w ...

aircraft with metal and composite materials, Yann Bruner, an engineer at Mines ParisTech with a PhD in Mechanics and Materials, noted that maintenance inspection reports are often incomplete for various reasons such as missing photographs, missing information, or illegible handwriting. He considered the use of drones to perform the inspection automatically. He contacted Matthieu Claybrough, who was involved in UAV projects at the Institut supérieur de l'aéronautique et de l'espace. A graduate of the Ecole Polytechnique, Claybrough has a specialization in innovation management,

aeronautics Aeronautics is the science or art involved with the study, design, and manufacturing of air flight–capable machines, and the techniques of operating aircraft and rockets within the atmosphere. The British Royal Aeronautical Society identifies ...

and control theory. uploaded by MIT Technology Review, 26 April 2016. Retrieved 27 August 2017 For three years he worked on the design of

automatic pilot An autopilot is a system used to control the path of an aircraft, marine craft or spacecraft without requiring constant manual control by a human operator. Autopilots do not replace human operators. Instead, the autopilot assists the operator' ...

s for aircraft, including helicopters for Thales Avionics, an avionics supplier. Two other partners joined them in the project. The first was Josselin Bequet, a graduate of the

École supérieure de commerce de Paris ESCP Business School (french: École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris) is a French business school and '' grande école'' founded in Paris and based across Europe with campuses in Paris, Berlin, London, Madrid, Turin, and Warsaw. It is consiste ...

(ESCP Europe) and the City, University of London who specializes in management and finance. The second was Alban Deruaz-Pepin, who graduated from the Institut Supérieur de l'Aéronautique et de l'Espace (ISAE-SUPAERO) and specializes in computer science and control theory, and holds a

private pilot license A private pilot licence (PPL) or, in the United States, a private pilot certificate, is a type of pilot licence that allows the holder to act as pilot in command of an aircraft privately (not for remuneration). The licence requirements are dete ...

. They founded the startup, Donecle, in September 2015 and developed an automated inspection procedure for aircraft with a swarm of UAVs. In June of That same year they presented their concept at the Paris Air Show.

Product

Although regulations and weather make it difficult to use UAVs in airspace near airports, Donecle developed a product that works both indoors and outdoors, using a laser positioning system for its UAVs. During the autonomous flight, cameras mounted on the UAVs photograph the exterior surface of the aircraft. Algorithms analyse the images and provide a diagnostic report about the aircraft surface. A human operator chooses a flight plan for the required inspection and a qualified inspector then validates the reports. Compared to human inspections that require scaffolding, inspection of the outer surface of a typical airliner with drones takes about twenty minutes versus six to ten hours and requires one person versus ten to twenty. The cost of taking an aircraft out of service can run at approximately $10,000 per hour, which makes UAV inspection cost effective. Donecle has filed patents for this process.

Development

Inspections use a set of mobile

Internet of Things The Internet of things (IoT) describes physical objects (or groups of such objects) with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other comm ...

(IoT) sensors, so at its inception in 2015, Donecle joined the Connected Camp, a business incubator in this field, located in the IoT Valley of Labège, a town south-east of Toulouse. The incubator aids the search for funding and provides some common equipment such as

3D printer 3D printing or additive manufacturing is the Manufacturing, construction of a three-dimensional object from a computer-aided design, CAD model or a digital 3D modeling, 3D model. It can be done in a variety of processes in which material is ...

s. uploaded by IoT Valley, 30 March 2017. Retrieved 26 August 2017 Donecle is a member of the Aerospace Valley competitiveness cluster, the Robotics Place cluster and the Hardware Club. In October 2016, it became a member of the Starburst Accelerator, the world's largest incubator for aerospace startups. In 2016, the company announced a partnership with the French-Dutch aeronautical maintenance group

Engineering and Maintenance (AFI-KLM E&M). The UAVs were tested on their aircraft to verify the marking and detection of defects. At the end of this testing and verification phase, AFI-KLM and Donecle planned to jointly deploy the equipment at AFI-KLM E&M maintenance sites. At the end of 2016, DDrone Invest, an investment company controlled by the French company Delta Drone, invested one million euros in Donecle. With this capital injection, the company became a shareholder, alongside the founders. At the Paris Air Show in 2017, the company announced that it was starting to sign its first contracts with air carriers and planned commercial deployment by the end of the year. During the year, the startup was planning to increase its workforce and to attract international clients. In 2018, at the ADS Show, a trade show for aerospace and defense maintenance, Donecle conducted a drone inspection of a Dassault Rafale, the French

multirole combat aircraft A multirole combat aircraft (MRCA) is a combat aircraft intended to perform different roles in combat. These roles can include air to air combat, air support, aerial bombing, reconnaissance, electronic warfare, and suppression of air defens ...

. In the future, the company intends to offer other types of inspections, such as

quality control Quality control (QC) is a process by which entities review the quality of all factors involved in production. ISO 9000 defines quality control as "a part of quality management focused on fulfilling quality requirements". This approach places ...

of exterior paint and the evaluation of corrosion. Planning is also underway for applications outside aviation, such as rail transport, shipbuilding and wind farms.

Technologies

Autonomous navigation

The Donecle UAV is a coaxial push-pull octocopter. The UAVs position themselves relative to the aircraft with laser positioning technology. This allows them to operate in enclosed areas, such as hangars, without the need for geolocation with

Global Positioning System The Global Positioning System (GPS), originally Navstar GPS, is a satellite-based radionavigation system owned by the United States government and operated by the United States Space Force. It is one of the global navigation satellite sy ...

(GPS). Algorithms compute in

real time Real-time or real time describes various operations in computing or other processes that must guarantee response times within a specified time (deadline), usually a relatively short time. A real-time process is generally one that happens in defined ...

the position of the UAV relative to the aircraft. The sensors used for autonomous navigation also ensure safe operation, by preventing collisions with aircraft, human personnel and equipment. The navigation plans and the number of UAVs employed in each case depend on the aircraft model to be analyzed. A single UAV is enough for a small airplane while up to six UAVs can be used for an Airbus A380. As the inspection missions are always the same, the routes are pre-programmed in the software installed on a tablet computer. A human operator does not need to pilot the UAVs, but only launches the mission and then the UAVs fly autonomously around the aircraft. They normally fly at a distance of one meter from the fuselage.

Visual inspection

The high-resolution cameras mounted on the UAVs photograph the surface of the aircraft.

algorithms perform the first step of detecting any region of interest on the fuselage. A second step of classification is then carried out in order to categorize defects (lightning strike, oil leak, scratching, texture irregularity, etc.) versus normal elements of the aircraft (screws, rivets, pitot tubes, etc.). The recognition algorithm is based on machine learning from the annotated databases of previous flights. The effectiveness of

deep learning Deep learning (also known as deep structured learning) is part of a broader family of machine learning methods based on artificial neural networks with representation learning. Learning can be supervised, semi-supervised or unsupervised. De ...

algorithms depends on the representativeness and the quantity of examples in each class. Databases suffer from the fact that there is only a small number of defects compared to the huge amount of normal elements present on an aircraft. The defects are, however, the most critical objects to classify. To overcome this difficulty, Donecle has done research to extend image annotations, using classical image processing techniques and generative adversarial networks. Other alternatives also considered include

one-shot learning One-shot learning is an object categorization problem, found mostly in computer vision. Whereas most machine learning-based object categorization algorithms require training on hundreds or thousands of examples, one-shot learning aims to classif ...

, which allows learning information about object categories from a single image, or a small number of training images. Diagnostics are provided in real time. Applications include fault detection and quality control of regulatory markings. At the end of the mission, a damage report is sent to a tablet computer with each region of interest and its proposed classification. The algorithm returns a confidence rate on its diagnosis. An inspector reviews at the images and validates or refutes the diagnostics.

Operational testing

The company's drone were employed in operational tests by Austrian Airlines in September 2019.

Awards and recognition

The startup and its founders have received the following awards: * 2016 Jean-Louis Gerondeau - Zodiac Aerospace award given by the foundation of the

école polytechnique (; also known as Polytechnique or l'X ) is a ''grande école'' located in Palaiseau, France. It specializes in science and engineering and is a founding member of the Polytechnic Institute of Paris. The school was founded in 1794 by mathe ...

* 2016 Galaxie Grand Prize by Galaxie club * 2016 Massachusetts Institute of Technology Innovators under 35 France, organized by MIT Technology Review * 2016 Young Engineer award - Technology and Aerospace by Norbert Ségard Foundation * 2016 La Tribune

BNP Paribas BNP Paribas is a French international banking group, founded in 2000 from the merger between Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP, "National Bank of Paris") and Paribas, formerly known as the Banque de Paris et des Pays-Bas. The full name of the grou ...

Young Entrepreneur award in the "start category" * 2016 Start me up first Innovation contest, organized by the

Crédit Agricole Crédit Agricole Group (), sometimes called La banque verte ( en, The green bank) due to its historical ties to farming, is a French international banking group and the world's largest cooperative financial institution. It is France's second lar ...

Toulouse 31 * 2016 Trophy of Innovation of the Aeromart business convention * 2017 Special Jury Award of French national competition for outdoor robotics * 2017 Disruptive Strategy Award in the startup category for the Grand-Sud region * 2018 Grand Prize of the 37th Inn'Ovations regional competition in the Midinnov show * 2020

Aviation Week Network The Aviation Week Network is a New-York based B2B publishing and event production company. The company was owned and published by McGraw-Hill until it was purchased by Penton Media in 2013. It was then bought by Informa in 2016 The Aviation Week ...

Laureate in the

maintenance, repair and overhaul Aircraft maintenance is the performance of tasks required to ensure the continuing airworthiness of an aircraft or aircraft part, including overhaul, inspection, replacement, defect rectification, and the embodiment of modifications, compliance w ...

References

External links

* {{Official website, http://www.donecle.com/ Companies based in Occitania (administrative region) French companies established in 2015 Industrial robots Maintenance Nondestructive testing Robotics companies Robots of France