Design and Development of Micro Aerial Vehicles and Their Cooperative Systems for Target Search and Tracking

This paper presents Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) and their cooperative systems including Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and a Base Station (BS), which were primarily designed for the 1st US-Asian Demonstration and Assessment on Micro-Aerial and Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology (MAV08). The MAVs are of coaxial design, which imparts mechanical stability both outdoor and indoor while obeying a 30 cm size constraint. They have carbon fibre frames for weight reduction allowing microcontrollers and various sensors to be mounted on-board for tele-operated and waypoint control. The UGVs are similarly equipped to perform their own search and tracking mission but also to support the MAVs by relaying data between the MAVs and the BS when they are out of direct range. The BS monitors the vehicles and their environment and navigates them autonomously or with humans in the loop through the developed GUI. The ability of the MAV in flight was demonstrated by showing continuous hovering. The efficacy of the overall system was validated by autonomously controlling two UGVs for cooperative search.

[1]  Nicholas Roy,et al.  Planning in information space for a quadrotor helicopter in a GPS-denied environment , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[2]  Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Coordinated decentralized search for a lost target in a Bayesian world , 2003, Proceedings 2003 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS 2003) (Cat. No.03CH37453).

[3]  Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Dynamic space reconfiguration for Bayesian search and tracking with moving targets , 2008, Auton. Robots.

[4]  Sergey V Shkarayev,et al.  Aerodynamic Design of Micro Air Vehicles for Vertical Flight , 2008 .

[5]  R. Lozano,et al.  Stabilization and location of a four rotor helicopter applying vision , 2006, 2006 American Control Conference.

[6]  Ming Liu,et al.  Stereo Vision based Relative Pose and Motion Estimation for Unmanned Helicopter Landing , 2006, 2006 IEEE International Conference on Information Acquisition.

[7]  Mario J. Valenti,et al.  Estimation and Control of a Quadrotor Vehicle Using Monocular Vision and Moire Patterns , 2006 .

[8]  R. D'Andrea,et al.  Real-time attitude estimation techniques applied to a four rotor helicopter , 2004, 2004 43rd IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (CDC) (IEEE Cat. No.04CH37601).

[9]  Tomonari Furukawa,et al.  Multi-vehicle Bayesian Search for Multiple Lost Targets , 2005, Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[10]  Camillo J. Taylor,et al.  Control of a Quadrotor Helicopter Using Dual Camera Visual Feedback , 2005, Int. J. Robotics Res..

[11]  Jonathan P. How,et al.  Autonomous aircraft flight control for constrained environments , 2008, 2008 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[12]  Jonathan P. How,et al.  Cooperative Vision Based Estimation and Tracking Using Multiple UAVs , 2007 .

[13]  Robert E. Mahony,et al.  Control of a quadrotor helicopter using visual feedback , 2002, Proceedings 2002 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.02CH37292).

[14]  Jonathan P. How,et al.  The MIT Indoor Multi-Vehicle Flight Testbed , 2007, Proceedings 2007 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation.

[15]  Eugene T. Gendlin,et al.  Process Model , 2017, Encyclopedia of GIS.

[16]  Wei Wang,et al.  Autonomous Control for Micro-Flying Robot and Small Wireless Helicopter X.R.B , 2006, 2006 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[17]  Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,et al.  The element-based method - theory and its application to bayesian search and tracking - , 2007, 2007 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems.

[18]  Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Process model, constraints, and the coordinated search strategy , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[19]  Alborz Geramifard,et al.  Co-ordinated Tracking and Planning Using Air and Ground Vehicles , 2008, ISER.

[20]  Hugh F. Durrant-Whyte,et al.  Recursive Bayesian search-and-tracking using coordinated uavs for lost targets , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[21]  Brett Bethke,et al.  Persistent vision-based search and track using multiple UAVs , 2007 .

[22]  Tomonari Furukawa,et al.  A localisation system for an indoor rotary‐wing MAV using blade mounted LEDs , 2008 .

[23]  G. Conte,et al.  Micro Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Visual Servoing for Cooperative Indoor Exploration , 2008, 2008 IEEE Aerospace Conference.