Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) with on-board augmentation systems (UAS, Unmanned Aircraft System) have penetrated into civil and general-purpose applications, due to advances in battery technology, control components, avionics and rapidly falling prices. This paper describes the conceptual design and the validation campaigns performed for an embedded precision Positioning, field mapping, Obstacle Detection and Avoiding (PODA) platform, which uses commercial-off-the-shelf sensors, i.e., a 10-Degrees-of-Freedom Inertial Measurement Unit (10-DoF IMU) and a Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR), managed by an Arduino Mega 2560 microcontroller with Wi-Fi capabilities. The PODA system, designed and tested for a commercial small quadcopter (Parrot Drones SAS Ar.Drone 2.0, Paris, France), estimates position, attitude and distance of the rotorcraft from an obstacle or a landing area, sending data to a PC-based ground station. The main design issues are presented, such as the necessary corrections of the IMU data (i.e., biases and measurement noise), and Kalman filtering techniques for attitude estimation, data fusion and position estimation from accelerometer data. The real-time multiple-sensor optimal state estimation algorithm, developed for the PODA platform and implemented on the Arduino, has been tested in typical aerospace application scenarios, such as General Visual Inspection (GVI), automatic landing and obstacle detection. Experimental results and simulations of various missions show the effectiveness of the approach.
Highlights
Flexibility, safety, customizability, high mobility and increasingly low costs, together with efforts in the fields of innovative materials, energy storage, sensors, imaging devices, electronics and computer science, have resulted in the last decade in a phenomenal development of consumer-grade and professional-grade semi-autonomous (Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems, RPAS) or autonomous aerial vehicles (Unmanned Aircraft Systems, UAS), as well as remotely operated vehicles for ground and sea applications [1,2,3]
Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR)-derived distance at 120 cm decreased from 1.69 cm to 1.00 cm after filtering
Lightweight, low-cost sensors (LiDAR and 10-DoF Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU)), a Wi-Fi module for data downlink to a ground station (PC or tablet) and a programmable microcontroller (Arduino Mega 2560) with standard I2 C interface are the main components of the PODA platform, which has shown adaptability, sustainability and cost reduction
Summary
Flexibility, safety, customizability, high mobility and increasingly low costs, together with efforts in the fields of innovative materials, energy storage, sensors, imaging devices, electronics and computer science, have resulted in the last decade in a phenomenal development of consumer-grade and professional-grade semi-autonomous (Remotely Piloted Aircraft Systems, RPAS) or autonomous aerial vehicles (Unmanned Aircraft Systems, UAS), as well as remotely operated vehicles for ground and sea applications (terrestrial rovers, unmanned ships, underwater drones) [1,2,3]. Paper with the developmentconceptual of a UASdesign with recently a Positioning, fieldinmapping, This[19], work,deals extending the preliminary presented a congressObstacle paper [19], Detection and Avoiding (PODA) embedded system [20], exploiting lightweight, low-cost and fastdeals with the development of a UAS with a Positioning, field mapping, Obstacle Detection and response sensors. The chosen sensors are a 10-Degrees-of-Freedom (DoF) Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) and a Light sensing applications, have been proposed for the effective assessment of landing zones for small. Advances in LiDAR technology have allowed users to load low-price [22] In this investigation, the LiDAR is usedUAV for measuring the reliable, distance small, from the ground,sensors whereas.
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