Autonomous UAV Battery Swapping

One of the main hindrances of unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology are power constraints. One way to alleviate some power constraints would be for two UAVs to exchange batteries while both are in flight. Autonomous mid-air battery swapping will expand the scope of UAV technology by allowing for indefinite flight times and longer missions. A single board computer will control each UAV’s flight software to respond to inputs to align with each other mid-flight. When the two UAVs have joined, mechanical components will exchange a depleted battery on the worker UAV for a freshly charged battery that belongs to the battery supply UAV. After the exchange, the drones will then detach themselves from each other, and the worker UAV will resume its mission while the battery supply UAV returns back to the ground control station

Sistem Pemandu Pendaratan pada Balon Udara Berbasis Pengolahan Citra dan Kendali Pid

Riset dan pengembangan studi Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) atau pesawat tanpa awak tengah berkembang pesat. Banyak Perusahaan besar memfokuskan dalam kegiatan ini, mulai dari aplikasi untuk pengantaran barang, teknologi bertani, hingga untuk penanganan bencana alam. UAV menggunakan sistem Navigasi global positioning system (GPS) untuk memandu menuju lokasi tujuan. Navigasi dengan GPS mempunyai kelemahan yaitu rawan terhadap error hingga mencapai puluhan meter. Sehingga dapat menyebabkan masalah pada saat mendarat di lokasi tujuan. Maka dari itu, dirancanglah sistem pemandu pendaratan pada UAV dalam hal ini balon udara untuk membantu navigasi GPS dalam meningkatkan keakuratan pendaratan. Dengan bantuan pengolahan citra, sistem akan membantu mengenali pola dari landasan dengan metode Hu Moments contour matching yang tidak berubah secara skala, rotasi, dan translasi. Dari hasil percobaan sistem dengan metode Hu Moments contour matching, didapatkan tingkat keakurasian sebesar 94% pada Perubahan skala secara ketinggian, 94% pada Perubahan rotasi

Arduino-Uno Based Mobile Data Logger with GPS Feature

Lightning activity correlates with the formation of thunderclouds which increase the atmospheric electric field (AEF) between the cloud and the earth. Observations of the development of the AEF will allow the prediction of lightning activities close to a particular location. In research and development, the data logger plays an important role to observe and collect data from AEF sensors. The data logger must be reliable and effective. High investment costs are involved in acquiring a data logger, and choosing a suitable data logger is not easy. Institut Voltan dan Arus Tinggi (IVAT) is develeloping AEF sensor. Along with that sensor development a data logger development is also required. In this paper, a mobile data logger is developed by using Arduino-Uno. This mobile data logger is equipped with a GPS module, which provides accurate positioning in the collection of data. Laboratory and field tests were carried out to observe the performance of the mobile data logger system. The results showed that the developed data logger works properly

Mobile Data Logger with GPS Feature for Ground Atmospheric Measurement

The data logger system plays an important role in research and development. In order to obtain valid data, the data logger must be reliable and effective. High investment costs are involved in acquiring a data logger, and choosing a suitable data logger is difficult. In this paper, a mobile data logger is developed by using Arduino-Uno. This mobile data logger is equipped with a GPS module, which provides accurate positioning in the collection of data. Laboratory and field tests were carried out to observe the performance of the mobile data logger system. The results showed that the performance of this system was acceptable

SISTEM PEMANDU PENDARATAN PADA BALON UDARA BERBASIS PENGOLAHAN CITRA DAN KENDALI PID

Riset dan pengembangan studi Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) atau pesawat tanpa awak tengah berkembang pesat. Banyak perusahaan besar memfokuskan dalam kegiatan ini, mulai dari aplikasi untuk pengantaran barang, teknologi bertani, hingga untuk penanganan bencana alam. UAV menggunakan sistem Navigasi global positioning system (GPS) untuk memandu menuju lokasi tujuan. Navigasi dengan GPS mempunyai kelemahan yaitu rawan terhadap error hingga mencapai puluhan meter. Sehingga dapat menyebabkan masalah pada saat mendarat di lokasi tujuan. Maka dari itu, dirancanglah sistem pemandu pendaratan pada UAV dalam hal ini balon udara untuk membantu navigasi GPS dalam meningkatkan keakuratan pendaratan. Dengan bantuan pengolahan citra, sistem akan membantu mengenali pola dari landasan dengan metode Hu Moments contour matching yang tidak berubah secara skala, rotasi, dan translasi. Dari hasil percobaan sistem dengan metode Hu Moments contour matching, didapatkan tingkat keakurasian sebesar 94% pada perubahan skala secara ketinggian, 94% pada perubahan rotasi

A SENSOR AIDED H.264/AVC VIDEO ENCODER FOR AERIAL VIDEO SEQUENCES WITH IN THE LOOP METADATA CORRECTION

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are often employed to collect high resolution images in order to perform image mosaicking and/or 3D reconstruction. Images are usually stored on board and then processed with on-ground desktop software. In such a way the computational load, and hence the power consumption, is moved on ground, leaving on board only the task of storing data. Such an approach is important in the case of small multi-rotorcraft UAVs because of their low endurance due to the short battery life. Images can be stored on board with either still image or video data compression. Still image system are preferred when low frame rates are involved, because video coding systems are based on motion estimation and compensation algorithms which fail when the motion vectors are significantly long and when the overlapping between subsequent frames is very small. In this scenario, UAVs attitude and position metadata from the Inertial Navigation System (INS) can be employed to estimate global motion parameters without video analysis. A low complexity image analysis can be still performed in order to refine the motion field estimated using only the metadata. In this work, we propose to use this refinement step in order to improve the position and attitude estimation produced by the navigation system in order to maximize the encoder performance. Experiments are performed on both simulated and real world video sequence

Multi-view horizon-driven sea plane estimation for stereo wave imaging on moving vessels

In the last few years we faced an increased popularity of stereo imaging as an effective tool to investigate wind sea waves at short and medium scales. Given the advances of computer vision techniques, the recovery of a scattered point-cloud from a sea surface area is nowadays a well consolidated technique producing excellent results both in terms of wave data resolution and accuracy. Nevertheless, almost all the subsequent analyses tasks, from the recovery of directional wave spectra to the estimation of significant wave height, are bound to two limiting conditions. First, wave data are required to be aligned to the mean sea plane. Second, a uniform distribution of 3D point samples is assumed. Since the stereo-camera rig is placed tilted with respect to the sea surface, perspective distortion do not allow these conditions to be met. Errors due to this problem are even more challenging if the optical instrumentation is mounted on a moving vessel, so that the mean sea plane cannot be simply obtained by averaging data from multiple subsequent frames. We address the first problem with two main contributions. First, we propose a novel horizon estimation technique to recover the attitude of a moving stereo rig with respect to the sea plane. Second, an effective weighting scheme is described to account for the non-uniform sampling of the scattered data in the estimation of the sea-plane distance. The interplay of the two allows us to provide a precise point cloud alignment without any external positioning sensor or rig viewpoint pre-calibration. The advantages of the proposed technique are evaluated throughout an experimental section spanning both synthetic and real-world scenarios