A Hierarchical Agentic Framework for Autonomous Drone-Based Visual Inspection

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Herron, Ethan, Lee, Xian Yeow, Sin, Gregory, Diaz, Teresa Gonzalez, Farahat, Ahmed, Gupta, Chetan
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Herron, Ethan
Lee, Xian Yeow
Sin, Gregory
Diaz, Teresa Gonzalez
Farahat, Ahmed
Gupta, Chetan
author_facet Herron, Ethan
Lee, Xian Yeow
Sin, Gregory
Diaz, Teresa Gonzalez
Farahat, Ahmed
Gupta, Chetan
contents Autonomous inspection systems are essential for ensuring the performance and longevity of industrial assets. Recently, agentic frameworks have demonstrated significant potential for automating inspection workflows but have been limited to digital tasks. Their application to physical assets in real-world environments, however, remains underexplored. In this work, our contributions are two-fold: first, we propose a hierarchical agentic framework for autonomous drone control, and second, a reasoning methodology for individual function executions which we refer to as ReActEval. Our framework focuses on visual inspection tasks in indoor industrial settings, such as interpreting industrial readouts or inspecting equipment. It employs a multi-agent system comprising a head agent and multiple worker agents, each controlling a single drone. The head agent performs high-level planning and evaluates outcomes, while worker agents implement ReActEval to reason over and execute low-level actions. Operating entirely in natural language, ReActEval follows a plan, reason, act, evaluate cycle, enabling drones to handle tasks ranging from simple navigation (e.g., flying forward 10 meters and land) to complex high-level tasks (e.g., locating and reading a pressure gauge). The evaluation phase serves as a feedback and/or replanning stage, ensuring actions align with user objectives while preventing undesirable outcomes. We evaluate the framework in a simulated environment with two worker agents, assessing performance qualitatively and quantitatively based on task completion across varying complexity levels and workflow efficiency. By leveraging natural language processing for agent communication, our approach offers a novel, flexible, and user-accessible alternative to traditional drone-based solutions, enabling autonomous problem-solving for industrial inspection without extensive user intervention.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_00259
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Hierarchical Agentic Framework for Autonomous Drone-Based Visual Inspection
Herron, Ethan
Lee, Xian Yeow
Sin, Gregory
Diaz, Teresa Gonzalez
Farahat, Ahmed
Gupta, Chetan
Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Systems and Control
Autonomous inspection systems are essential for ensuring the performance and longevity of industrial assets. Recently, agentic frameworks have demonstrated significant potential for automating inspection workflows but have been limited to digital tasks. Their application to physical assets in real-world environments, however, remains underexplored. In this work, our contributions are two-fold: first, we propose a hierarchical agentic framework for autonomous drone control, and second, a reasoning methodology for individual function executions which we refer to as ReActEval. Our framework focuses on visual inspection tasks in indoor industrial settings, such as interpreting industrial readouts or inspecting equipment. It employs a multi-agent system comprising a head agent and multiple worker agents, each controlling a single drone. The head agent performs high-level planning and evaluates outcomes, while worker agents implement ReActEval to reason over and execute low-level actions. Operating entirely in natural language, ReActEval follows a plan, reason, act, evaluate cycle, enabling drones to handle tasks ranging from simple navigation (e.g., flying forward 10 meters and land) to complex high-level tasks (e.g., locating and reading a pressure gauge). The evaluation phase serves as a feedback and/or replanning stage, ensuring actions align with user objectives while preventing undesirable outcomes. We evaluate the framework in a simulated environment with two worker agents, assessing performance qualitatively and quantitatively based on task completion across varying complexity levels and workflow efficiency. By leveraging natural language processing for agent communication, our approach offers a novel, flexible, and user-accessible alternative to traditional drone-based solutions, enabling autonomous problem-solving for industrial inspection without extensive user intervention.
title A Hierarchical Agentic Framework for Autonomous Drone-Based Visual Inspection
topic Multiagent Systems
Artificial Intelligence
Robotics
Systems and Control
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.00259