StratoTrans : Unmanned Aerial System (UAS) 4G communication framework applied on the monitoring of road traffic and linear infrastructure

This study provides an operational solution to directly connect drones to internet by means of 4G telecommunications and exploit drone acquired data, including telemetry and imagery but focusing on video transmission. The novelty of this work is the application of 4G connection to link the drone directly to a data server where video (in this case to monitor road traffic) and imagery (in the case of linear infrastructures) are processed. However, this framework is appliable to any other monitoring purpose where the goal is to send real-time video or imagery to the headquarters where the drone data is processed, analyzed, and exploited. We describe a general framework and analyze some key points, such as the hardware to use, the data stream, and the network coverage, but also the complete resulting implementation of the applied unmanned aerial system (UAS) communication system through a Virtual Private Network (VPN) featuring a long-range telemetry high-capacity video link (up to 15 Mbps, 720 p video at 30 fps with 250 ms of latency). The application results in the real-time exploitation of the video, obtaining key information for traffic managers such as vehicle tracking, vehicle classification, speed estimation, and roundabout in-out matrices. The imagery downloads and storage is also performed thorough internet, although the Structure from Motion postprocessing is not real-time due to photogrammetric workflows. In conclusion, we describe a real-case application of drone connection to internet thorough 4G network, but it can be adapted to other applications. Although 5G will -in time- surpass 4G capacities, the described framework can enhance drone performance and facilitate paths for upgrading the connection of on-board devices to the 5G network

Software platform to control squads of unmanned vehicles in realtime

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) applications are becoming more and more researched. “Drones” (UAVs) were mainly used as a military technology but are now becoming a leisure and professional activity for many civilian users. Nowadays UAVs are mostly controlled by the use of a controller that operates in Radio Control (RC), although this method of communication limits the vehicle’s distance to the line of sight of the operator. As a need to overcome the line of sight obstacle, cellular networks provide a mean of connection and as the coverage is increasing they’re a natural solution as Wi-Fi is not present everywhere. In order to accomplish this communication between Drone and Operator, there needs to be a Ground Control Station that provides the user all the tools needed to operate the vehicle. This project provides a software platform that is able to monitor a squad of drones whilst also being able to control one at a time. The platform maintains the communication with the vehicle at all times, and is also be able to receive live-video in order to overcome the beyond line of sight obstacle. Besides this, the application provides an admin user, with the capability of overriding a regular user’s control, assigning the user’s drone to itself for controlling purposes. A public server is used to make the exchanging of messages possible, and to have a centralized control over drones and their respective user. Keywords:Os Veículos Aéreos Não Tripulados (UAVs) são cada vez mais utilizados e desenvolvidos. O que antes era utilizado principalmente como tecnologia militar, tem-se vindo a tornar uma profissão ou um hobbie para muitos civis. Hoje em dia os UAVs são controlados geralmente através de um comando, que opera em Radio Controlo (RC) e, embora seja muito utilizado, este método de comunicação limita a distância do veículo à linha de visão do operador. Este é um obstáculo que se tem procurado ultrapassar e as redes móveis providenciam o meio necessário para tal. Desta forma e como a cobertura das redes móveis tem aumentado progressivamente é hoje em dia uma alternativa ao Wi-Fi que não tem o mesmo alcance nem a mesma cobertura. Para que a comunicação entre drone e operador seja viável, tem que existir uma estação de controlo que forneça ao utilizador todas as ferramentas necessárias para operar o veículo. Este projeto visa a criação de uma plataforma de software que seja capaz de monitorizar uma esquadra de UAVs e seja também capaz de controlar um aparelho de cada vez. A plataforma mantém a comunicação com o veículo em todos os momentos, e permite ainda a receção de vídeo ao vivo, superando assim o obstáculo da linha de vista. Também é disponibilizada a um administrador a capacidade de retirar o controlo dos utilizadores aos seus drones alterando assim o responsável pelo controlo. É também utilizado um servidor público de forma a tornar a troca de mensagens possível e também por outro lado, controlar de forma centralizada os drones e os seus respetivos utilizadores. Palavras-chave: Monitorização, Controlo Remoto, Redes Sem fios, Aplicação, Drone

An unmanned aircraft system to detect a radiological point source using RIMA software architecture

Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UASs), together with the miniaturisation of computers, sensors, and electronics, offer new remote sensing applications. However, there is a lack of hardware and software support to effectively develop the potential of UASs in different remote sensing applications, such as the detection of radioactive sources. This paper presents the design, development and validation of a UAS for the detection of an uncontrolled and point radioactive source. The article describes a flexible and reusable software architecture for detecting the radioactive source (NaTcO 4 , containing 99m Tc) with a gamma-ray Cadmium Zinc Telluride (CZT) spectrometer as a proof of concept. The UAS is equipped with multichannel air-ground communications to perform missions beyond line of sight and onboard computation to process samples in real time and thus react to any anomaly detected during the mission. An ad hoc ground control station (GCS) has also been developed for the correct interpretation of the radioactive samples taken by the UAS. Radiological spectra plots, contour mapping and waterfall plots are some of the elements used in the ad hoc GCS. The article shows the results obtained in a flight campaign performing different flights at different altitudes and speeds over the radiological source, demonstrating the viability of the system.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Sailing with a ghost ship: Design guidelines for developing supervisory control interfaces for the semi-autonomous cargo vessel system

Rolls-Royce Marine is currently developing a semi-autonomous cargo vessel. The semi-autonomous cargo ship operation is a supervisory control task, in which the human operator is receiving information from a remote semi-autonomous vessel and instructing it through supervisory control interfaces. Thus, it is necessary to have supervisory control interfaces to carry the operation. But, the design guidelines for the interfaces are unclear, because of the lack of semi-autonomous cargo ships. The thesis presents design guidelines for developing supervisory control interfaces for the semi-autonomous cargo vessel. The research question answered in this thesis is: “How to design a supervisory control interface for remote semi-autonomous cargo vessel system to enable intuitive and precise instruction of the course plan?” The author answers the question through a research and design process that consists of the problem and solution spaces. The problem space suggests design requirements through a literature review and experts interviews. The literature review gives contextual and theoretical knowledge to design supervisory control interfaces. The expert interviews with video gamers and autonomous ship experts present potential user needs and design considerations. The findings from the problem space combine and formulate design requirements. The solution space ideates and prototypes a supervisory control interface prototype by applying the design requirements. The prototype has been evaluated in usability tests with sailors and autonomous ship expert. The findings from the usability tests are linked to the design requirements to evaluate how the designed solution fulfils design requirements. The thesis contributes to the design of semi-autonomous cargo vessel supervisory control interfaces by answering to the research question. In the conclusion part, the author answer to the research question by suggesting three design themes, which are synthetics of the design requirements and analysis. The design themes are: providing situation awareness, intuitive manipulation, and collaborative control. With these design themes designers will be able to develop supervisory control interfaces, which present intuitive and precise course planning capability to the operators. At the same time, the findings of the thesis will provide several directions for further research, such as researching an unmanned surface vehicle supervisory control interface

Study of the requirements of an autonomous system for surface water quality monitoring

In recent years, there has been increasing awareness of the preservation, protection and sustainable use of natural resources. Water resources, being one of the most important natural resources, face major threats due to contamination by pollutants of various types and origins. Maintaining the quality of water resources requires more robust, reliable and more frequent monitoring than traditional techniques of data collection based on sporadic, discontinuous and manual processes. The management of large geographical areas, the insufficient spatiotemporal discretization of the values of samples collected by traditional processes and the unpredictability of natural phenomena, require a new approach to data collection procedures. This article, which is the result of ongoing research, defines the technical requirements and technologies used in a continuous and regular monitoring of surface water quality in freshwater systems, whose data acquisition system helps to identify the sources of pollution and the contaminants flow along the waterways. The design of a versatile real-time water quality monitoring system, which, due to its environmental constraints should be based on renewable energies and wireless transfer of energy, will contribute to improve the management and effective protection of water resources.This work was supported by Centro2020, Portugal 2020 and European Union (EU) under the grants, CENTRO-01-0145-FEDER-024052E – Libélula: Mobile robotic surface water quality monitoring system.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Advances in Human Robot Interaction for Cloud Robotics applications

In this thesis are analyzed different and innovative techniques for Human Robot Interaction. The focus of this thesis is on the interaction with flying robots. The first part is a preliminary description of the state of the art interactions techniques. Then the first project is Fly4SmartCity, where it is analyzed the interaction between humans (the citizen and the operator) and drones mediated by a cloud robotics platform. Then there is an application of the sliding autonomy paradigm and the analysis of different degrees of autonomy supported by a cloud robotics platform. The last part is dedicated to the most innovative technique for human-drone interaction in the User’s Flying Organizer project (UFO project). This project wants to develop a flying robot able to project information into the environment exploiting concepts of Spatial Augmented Realit

People identification system with unmanned aerial vehicles

In this Bachelor's Degree Final Project, a mobile application for person identification using a DJI drone and the DJI Mobile SDK and DJI UX SDK software libraries is designed, implemented, and tested. The application tries to "identify" a specific person among those that are "detected" in the image. Our proposal, for this, is that the person who wants to be identified wears a GPS device to merge the information from the "people detector" with the "location" information provided by the GPS. The operation of the application mainly involves monitoring an MQTT server where different devices will upload their position using geodetic coordinates. Then, based on these coordinates, the application will perform a coordinate system transformation to obtain the pixel coordinates where the device is located. With these coordinates, the device's position can be overlaid on the video. Additionally, the application includes other visual functionalities such as a manager for photos and videos taken by the drone, a mini-map to visualize the drone's and surrounding devices' positions, a coordinate converter from screen points to geodetic coordinates, and the ability to write device data and drone position and attitude data to a text file. For the development of the application, various Software Development Kits (SDKs) are used, which provide the necessary resources for application development. Some of the SDKs used include the Android SDK, DJI UX SDK, and DJI Mobile SDK, with the latter two being from DJI. The MQTT protocol is used for message exchange between the drone and the different devices in the field. This protocol is based on centralized data exchange on a server and utilizes a publish-subscribe system. Furthermore, three different devices are used to obtain the user's location through GPS and send it to the MQTT server for the drone to access. One of these devices is created using a Raspberry Pi, another is an Android app, and the last one is based on a board from ArduSimple. Upon completing the application development, the project's initial objectives have been successfully achieved. A functional application has been programmed, and a device compatible with the specified requirements has been developed.Objectius de Desenvolupament Sostenible::16 - Pau, Justícia i Institucions Sòlide

Generalized software application for operation of a 3D vehicle in air, water and land

The unmanned vehicles (UV) and its applications are growing exponentially. Using the radio control is the most common way to control these types of vehicles for being a simple and cheap method to control an UV. However, it doesn’t have a visual interface that allows the user to see the vehicle’s information such as battery status, speed, distance, geolocation, etc. To deal with this problem, some mobile and desktop applications have been developed. To communicate between the control device and the vehicle, dongles are commonly used to establish the connection using radio, Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. In most cases, these technologies don’t allow the user to control at long distances, Beyond Line Of-Sight (BLOS), and these applications are focused to use mostly on multi-copters, and most of the times, they only allow to connect a vehicle at a time. The purpose of this dissertation is to study the reliability of an application able to control multiple types of vehicles, such as aerial, land and water vehicles. This application allows the user to connect multiple vehicles at the same time using a single device, easily change the vehicle assigned to control, by using mobile networks to perform the communication between the developed application and the vehicle. In this way, it will be possible to connect a 3D – hybrid vehicle, which is a vehicle capable of moving in water, land and air environments, allowing the user to control the vehicle at long distances with video feedback. To achieve the purpose of this dissertation, it was developed an Android application to allow controlling the vehicle by using mobile networks to communicate. In the vehicle, besides the common electronics used in an unmanned vehicle (ESC’s, motors, batteries, controller board, etc.), it will be used a Raspberry Pi 2 model B with a 3rd Generation (3G) and 4th Generation (4G) dongle that will connect the vehicle to the internet, routing the messages coming from the controller board placed in the vehicle to the mobile application. It was also developed a server application to do the user management and exchange the messages coming from both platforms: vehicle and application.Os veículos não tripulados e as suas aplicações estão em forte crescimento. O uso de rádio controlo é a maneira mais comum de controlar estes tipos de veículos, sendo o método mais barato e simples de controlar um veículo não tripulado. Contudo, não têm uma interface visual que permita ao utilizador ver as informações do veículo, tais como o nível da bateria, a velocidade, distância, geolocalização, entre outros. Para ajudar com este problema, têm sido desenvolvidas algumas aplicações para dispositivos móveis e computadores, que permitem controlar e monitorizar este tipo de veículos. Para estabelecer a comunicação entre o dispositivo de controlo e o veículo, são frequentemente usados dongles para comunicar por rádio, Bluetooth ou Wi-Fi. Na maioria dos casos, estas tecnologias não possibilitam ao utilizador o controlo a longas distâncias, para além da linha de vista, e costumam ser focadas para o uso em multicopteros, possibilitando, na maioria dos casos, a ligação de um único veículo. O âmbito desta dissertação pretende estudar e desenvolver uma aplicação com elevada fiabilidade, capaz de controlar vários tipos de veículos, nomeadamente, veículos aéreos, terrestres e aquáticos. Esta aplicação irá permitir a ligação a vários veículos ao mesmo tempo, trocar facilmente o veiculo a controlar, recorrendo aos sistemas de comunicação móveis celulares, 3ª geração (3G ) e 4ª geração (4G) para garantir a comunicação entre a aplicação desenvolvida e o veículo não tripulado. Seguindo estes princípios, é possível controlar um veículo 3D hibrido (em modo de ar, terra e mar). Esta permite ao utilizador controlar o veículo a longas distâncias com o uso de uma transmissão de vídeo. Para alcançar o objetivo desta dissertação foi desenvolvida uma aplicação Android para possibilitar o controlo recorrendo às redes móveis celulares. No veículo, além da eletrónica habitual, para um veículo não tripulado (motores, ESC’s, baterias, etc.), será também utilizado um Raspberry Pi 2 modelo B com um dongle 3G/4G que liga o veículo, redirecionando as mensagens vindas da placa de controlo para a aplicação móvel. Para a comunicação entre a aplicação e o veículo foi também desenvolvida uma aplicação instalada no servidor que é responsável pela gestão de utilizadores e pela troca de mensagens vindas de ambas as plataformas: veículo e aplicação