The invention relates to a system for automatically inspecting a surface of an object such as an aircraft (54), a transport vehicle, a building or an engineering structure, said surface being liable to contain a defect.The system is characterized in that it comprises a fleet comprising at least one flying robot (14a, 14b, 14c), each flying robot comprising a module for acquiring images of at least one portion of the surface to be inspected, and a module for processing the acquired images, which module is suitable for providing information representative of the state of each inspected surface portion, which information is called the processing result.