3,993 research outputs found
Autonomous 3D Exploration of Large Structures Using an UAV Equipped with a 2D LIDAR
This paper addressed the challenge of exploring large, unknown, and unstructured
industrial environments with an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). The resulting system combined
well-known components and techniques with a new manoeuvre to use a low-cost 2D laser to measure
a 3D structure. Our approach combined frontier-based exploration, the Lazy Theta* path planner, and
a flyby sampling manoeuvre to create a 3D map of large scenarios. One of the novelties of our system
is that all the algorithms relied on the multi-resolution of the octomap for the world representation.
We used a Hardware-in-the-Loop (HitL) simulation environment to collect accurate measurements
of the capability of the open-source system to run online and on-board the UAV in real-time. Our
approach is compared to different reference heuristics under this simulation environment showing
better performance in regards to the amount of explored space. With the proposed approach, the UAV
is able to explore 93% of the search space under 30 min, generating a path without repetition that
adjusts to the occupied space covering indoor locations, irregular structures, and suspended obstaclesUnión Europea Marie Sklodowska-Curie 64215Unión Europea MULTIDRONE (H2020-ICT-731667)Uniión Europea HYFLIERS (H2020-ICT-779411
3D UAV Trajectory and Communication Design for Simultaneous Uplink and Downlink Transmission
In this paper, we investigate the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-Aided simultaneous uplink and downlink transmission networks, where one UAV acting as a disseminator is connected to multiple access points (AP), and the other UAV acting as a base station (BS) collects data from numerous sensor nodes (SNs). The goal of this paper is to maximize the system throughput by jointly optimizing the 3D UAV trajectory, communication scheduling, and UAV-AP/SN transmit power. We first consider a special case where the UAV-BS and UAV-AP trajectories are pre-determined. Although the resulting problem is an integer and non-convex optimization problem, a globally optimal solution is obtained by applying the polyblock outer approximation (POA) method based on the problem's hidden monotonic structure. Subsequently, for the general case considering the 3D UAV trajectory optimization, an efficient iterative algorithm is proposed to alternately optimize the divided sub-problems based on the successive convex approximation (SCA) technique. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed design is able to achieve significant system throughput gain over the benchmarks. In addition, the SCA-based method can achieve nearly the same performance as the POA-based method with much lower computational complexity
Mobile Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for Energy-Efficient Internet of Things Communications
In this paper, the efficient deployment and mobility of multiple unmanned
aerial vehicles (UAVs), used as aerial base stations to collect data from
ground Internet of Things (IoT) devices, is investigated. In particular, to
enable reliable uplink communications for IoT devices with a minimum total
transmit power, a novel framework is proposed for jointly optimizing the
three-dimensional (3D) placement and mobility of the UAVs, device-UAV
association, and uplink power control. First, given the locations of active IoT
devices at each time instant, the optimal UAVs' locations and associations are
determined. Next, to dynamically serve the IoT devices in a time-varying
network, the optimal mobility patterns of the UAVs are analyzed. To this end,
based on the activation process of the IoT devices, the time instances at which
the UAVs must update their locations are derived. Moreover, the optimal 3D
trajectory of each UAV is obtained in a way that the total energy used for the
mobility of the UAVs is minimized while serving the IoT devices. Simulation
results show that, using the proposed approach, the total transmit power of the
IoT devices is reduced by 45% compared to a case in which stationary aerial
base stations are deployed. In addition, the proposed approach can yield a
maximum of 28% enhanced system reliability compared to the stationary case. The
results also reveal an inherent tradeoff between the number of update times,
the mobility of the UAVs, and the transmit power of the IoT devices. In
essence, a higher number of updates can lead to lower transmit powers for the
IoT devices at the cost of an increased mobility for the UAVs.Comment: Accepted in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, Sept. 201
Vision and Learning for Deliberative Monocular Cluttered Flight
Cameras provide a rich source of information while being passive, cheap and
lightweight for small and medium Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). In this work
we present the first implementation of receding horizon control, which is
widely used in ground vehicles, with monocular vision as the only sensing mode
for autonomous UAV flight in dense clutter. We make it feasible on UAVs via a
number of contributions: novel coupling of perception and control via relevant
and diverse, multiple interpretations of the scene around the robot, leveraging
recent advances in machine learning to showcase anytime budgeted cost-sensitive
feature selection, and fast non-linear regression for monocular depth
prediction. We empirically demonstrate the efficacy of our novel pipeline via
real world experiments of more than 2 kms through dense trees with a quadrotor
built from off-the-shelf parts. Moreover our pipeline is designed to combine
information from other modalities like stereo and lidar as well if available
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