Development of Aerial-Ground Sensing Network: Architecture, Sensor Activation, and Spatial Path-Energy Optimization

Title from PDF of title page viewed May 13, 2019Dissertation advisor: ZhiQiang ChenVitaIncludes bibliographical references (pages 101-110)Thesis (Ph.D.)--School of Computing and Engineering. University of Missouri--Kansas City, 2019The advent of autonomous navigation, positioning, and in general robotics technologies has enabled the maturity of small to miniature-sized unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs; or colloquially called drones) and their wide use in engineering practice as a low-cost and effective geospatial remote sensing solution. Meanwhile, wireless sensing network technology (WSN) has also matured in recent years with many applications found in engineering practice. In this dissertation, a novel aerial ground wireless sensing network (AG-WSN) is developed, which is expected to transform a number of critical geospatial sensing and monitoring practices, such as precision agriculture, civil infrastructure protection, and disaster response. Towards the maximal energy efficiency, three research problems are concerned in this dissertation. First, a radio-frequency (RF) wake-up mechanism is investigated for aerial activation of ground sensors using a UAV platform. Second, the data transmission under wireless interference between the UAV and ground WSN is experimentally investigated, which suggests practical relations and parameters for aerial-ground communication configuration. Last, this dissertation theoretically explores and develops an optimization framework for UAV's aerial path planning when collecting ground-sensor data. An improved mixed-integer non-linear programming approach is proposed for solving the optimal spatial path-energy using the framework of the traveling-salesman problem with neighborhoods.Introduction -- Development of radio-frequency sensor wake-up through UAV as an aerial gateway -- Experimental investigation of aerial-ground network communication towards geospatially large-scale structural health monitoring -- Spatial path-energy optimization for tactic unmanned aerial vehicles operation in aerial-ground networking -- Conclusion and future wor