A ROBOTIC FLYING CRANE CONTROLLED BY AN EMBEDDED COMPUTER CLUSTER

Abstract

The applications of UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) are growing up and becoming part of many daily tasks in many organizations. However, as matter of fact, the use of a UAV does not mean the decreasing of operational complexities and, consequently, the costs of perform its tasks. Sometimes this high cost is connected to the dependence of well-trained operators and huge remote control facilities to operate asophisticated UAV's. This paper proposes a robotic flying crane using UAV that can perform its tasks as much independent of human interaction as possible, and with a minimum connection to any mission control facilities. This independence will beachieved by embedding the path mission control into the UAV. As path control is embedded, the UAV will have less connections issues with its control center and will be less dependable of human interaction. To prove this concept all kinematics anddynamics of a light than air vehicle (blimp) is develop; a prototype of an embedded parallel-distributed compute was constructed; and new procedures to resolve navigations and collision evasions issues are proposed. The new evasion procedures were implemented into a simulator and a new parallel / distributed program for optimal path discover was developed to be used into the cluster prototype. Tests of the evasion procedures simulator were satisfactory and speed up of embedded proposed cluster showed better performance of proposed framework.