A Pocket Sized Foldable Quadcopter for Situational Awareness and Reconnaissance

Flying robots are rapidly becoming an essential tool in search and rescue missions because they can rapidly gather information from inaccessible or unsafe locations, thus increasing safety and rapidity of interventions. With this aim, we present a pocket sized foldable quadcopter equipped with a camera. The drone is a portable and rugged “flying-eye” that aims to extend or move the field of view of the rescuer for situational awareness and safe reconnaissance. The quadcopter can be packaged for transportation by folding its arms and it self-deploys in a glimpse before usage. Its compliant foldable arms make it rugged, reducing the risk of failure after collisions. The drone is remotely operated and it can stream sound, thermal and visual images in real time to rescuers. The prototype of the foldable quadcopter is experimentally characterized and assessed in preliminary field tests

Insect-Inspired Mechanical Resilience for Multicopters

The ease of use and versatility of drones has contributed to their deployment in several fields, from entertainment to search and rescue. However, drones remain vulnerable to collisions due to pilot mistakes or various system failures. This paper presents a bioinspired strategy for the design of quadcopters resilient to collisions. Abstracting the biomechanical strategy of collision resilient insects’ wings, the quadcopter has a dual-stiffness frame that rigidly withstands aerodynamic loads within the flight envelope, but can soften and fold during a collision to avoid damage. The dual-stiffness frame works in synergy with specific energy absorbing materials that protect the sensitive components of the drone hosted in the central case. The proposed approach is compared to other state-of- the art collision-tolerance strategies and is validated in a 50g quadcopter that can withstand high speed collisions

FOLDAWAY DroneSense, a controller for haptic information encoding for drone pilots

Over the last decade, the number of drones has significantly increased. In parallel, researchers have started to investigate new human-drone interaction paradigms for a more natural and immersive piloting experience. The use of haptic feedback to establish a bidirectional interaction with a remote drone is a promising yet not fully exploited paradigm. In this article we introduce FOLDAWAY DroneSense, a portable controller with multi-directional force feedback for drone piloting. We also discuss four haptic interaction paradigms with the aim of boosting immersion and safety during teleoperation, and to simplify the training of first-time users

When Being Soft Makes You Tough: A Collision Resilient Quadcopter Inspired by Arthropod Exoskeletons

Flying robots are usually rather delicate, and require protective enclosures when facing the risk of collision. High complexity and reduced payload are recurrent problems with collision-tolerant flying robots. Inspired by arthropods' exoskeletons, we design a simple, easily manufactured, semi-rigid structure with flexible joints that can withstand high-velocity impacts. With an exoskeleton, the protective shell becomes part of the main robot structure, thereby minimizing its loss in payload capacity. Our design is simple to build and customize using cheap components and consumer-grade 3D printers. Our results show we can build a sub-250g, autonomous quadcopter with visual navigation that can survive multiple collisions at speeds up to 7m/s that is also suitable for automated battery swapping, and with enough computing power to run deep neural network models. This structure makes for an ideal platform for high-risk activities (such as flying in a cluttered environment or reinforcement learning training) without damage to the hardware or the environment

Open Aerial Map, Drones and Archaeology: The implications of using drones to contribute and share aerial data on an open data repository

The purpose of this research is to determine the potential benefits and challenges of volunteered aerial imagery by looking at OpenAerialMap (OAM) and by presenting how a repository like OAM may be applied in archaeological studies. The interviews and survey conducted in this research indicate that the main benefits of OAM are affordability, accessibility, rapid mapping and historic image preservation. Among the key challenges identified are concerns around data quality and privacy. Though most of the images on OAM are of high resolution, there is currently no way to guarantee the quality of images that people share on OAM. Similarly, there are no real safeguards against the misuse the openly available imagery. This is a prominent concern in archaeology, where open aerial images may increase the looting and destruction of heritage sites. Then again, OAM can aid in a number of ways in terms of archaeological research and it may even contribute to citizen engagement in archaeology. The research indicates that OAM is a positive endeavour that makes spatial data more accessible and provides drone users with the ability to engage in citizen science

Remotely Operated Aerial Vehicles and Their Applications

This project examines relevant designs and applications of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We propose UAV design solutions, which can be refined and incorporated into emergency medical services. Mathematical and engineering concepts are used to select the design solutions. We believe that the proposed design solutions will enhance the quality of care in emergency medical services

Social work with airports passengers

Social work at the airport is in to offer to passengers social services. The main methodological position is that people are under stress, which characterized by a particular set of characteristics in appearance and behavior. In such circumstances passenger attracts in his actions some attention. Only person whom he trusts can help him with the documents or psychologically