Abstract

The maintenance of aged city infrastructure is one of the severe monetary and labor-cost-consuming problems. We have been developing a sewer pipe inspection system using multiple radio-controlled UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) to reduce the inspection time and labor cost. This system constructs a linear multi-hop wireless network with multiple UAVs in a sewer pipe to compensate for the short Wi-Fi communication range in narrow underground pipes. Video data captured by a head UAV equipped with a camera is transmitted via wireless LAN communication to relay UAVs and a control node and then to an operation terminal on the ground. If the UAVs use only one common Wi-Fi channel, collisions between packets on the same data flow, as well as different data flows, on the multi-hop topology cause packet losses and lead to low throughput of video data and low reliability of control command message delivery. We have designed a video data and UAVs control command transmission method for the system based on the intermittent periodic transmission (IPT) technique and conducted simulations. We confirmed that the video data and UAV control commands can be transmitted with low end-to-end delay, low packet loss rate, and small jitter compared with vanilla UDP and RTS/CTS-enabled UDP-based transmissions.

Talk to us

Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have

Schedule a call

Disclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.