  This paper presents a real-time control system for surface inspection using
multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). The UAVs are coordinated in a
specific formation to collect data of the inspecting objects. The communication
platform for data transmission is based on the Internet of Things (IoT). In the
proposed architecture, the UAV formation is established via using the
angle-encoded particle swarm optimisation to generate an inspecting path and
redistribute it to each UAV where communication links are embedded with an IoT
board for network and data processing capabilities. Data collected are
transmitted in real time through the network to remote computational units. To
detect potential damage or defects, an online image processing technique is
proposed and implemented based on histograms. Extensive simulation, experiments
and comparisons have been conducted to verify the validity and performance of
the proposed system.
