Invited Speaker 1: Navigation without GPS for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Abstract

In recent years, research and development of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have gained much attention in the academic and industrial communities worldwide. Extensive research and development have been done for UAVs to operate in complex and unknown environments, especially in GPS-denied environments. Consideration of a wide range of factors needs to be observed in such environments. Control systems for the unmanned vehicles are required to integrate, not only the basic input-output control laws but also the high-level functionalities for perception, decision making and task scheduling. Software systems for unmanned vehicles are required to perform tasks from hardware driving to the management of device operations, and from traditional input-output control law implementation to sensing, task scheduling and event management. In this talk, in-depth research in the advanced autonomous systems on UAVs is presented, involving automate flight process in GPS-denied environments, such as below the forest canopy or indoor environments, in which a board range of sensing and navigation technologies have been used. The sensors and algorithms plan the drones' flight paths, make sense of where they are, and to ensure that they do not collide with obstacles. All these are done automatically with no human intervention. The proposed systems have been successfully tested in both simulations and real flight experiments. Several related applications of the autonomous systems on UAVs will also be presented.