How much does a man cost? A dirty, dull, and dangerous application

Thesis (M.A.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2017This study illuminates the many abilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). One area of importance includes the UAV's capability to assist in the development, implementation, and execution of crisis management. This research focuses on UAV uses in pre and post crisis planning and accomplishments. The accompaniment of unmanned vehicles with base teams can make crisis management plans more reliable for the general public and teams faced with tasks such as search and rescue and firefighting. In the fight for mass acceptance of UAV integration, knowledge and attitude inventories were collected and analyzed. Methodology includes mixed method research collected by interviews and questionnaires available to experts and ground teams in the UAV fields, mining industry, firefighting and police force career field, and general city planning crisis management members. This information was compiled to assist professionals in creation of general guidelines and recommendations for how to utilize UAVs in crisis management planning and implementation as well as integration of UAVs into the educational system. The results from this study show the benefits and disadvantages of strategically giving UAVs a role in the construction and implementation of crisis management plans and other areas of interest. The results also show that the general public is lacking information and education on the abilities of UAVs. This education gap shows a correlation with negative attitudes towards UAVs. Educational programs to teach the public benefits of UAV integration should be implemented

Generic Drone Control Platform for Autonomous Capture of Cinema Scenes

The movie industry has been using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles as a new tool to produce more and more complex and aesthetic camera shots. However, the shooting process currently rely on manual control of the drones which makes it difficult and sometimes inconvenient to work with. In this paper we address the lack of autonomous system to operate generic rotary-wing drones for shooting purposes. We propose a global control architecture based on a high-level generic API used by many UAV. Our solution integrates a compound and coupled model of a generic rotary-wing drone and a Full State Feedback strategy. To address the specific task of capturing cinema scenes, we combine the control architecture with an automatic camera path planning approach that encompasses cinematographic techniques. The possibilities offered by our system are demonstrated through a series of experiments

Aerial Remote Sensing in Agriculture: A Practical Approach to Area Coverage and Path Planning for Fleets of Mini Aerial Robots

In this paper, a system that allows applying precision agriculture techniques is described. The application is based on the deployment of a team of unmanned aerial vehicles that are able to take georeferenced pictures in order to create a full map by applying mosaicking procedures for postprocessing. The main contribution of this work is practical experimentation with an integrated tool. Contributions in different fields are also reported. Among them is a new one-phase automatic task partitioning manager, which is based on negotiation among the aerial vehicles, considering their state and capabilities. Once the individual tasks are assigned, an optimal path planning algorithm is in charge of determining the best path for each vehicle to follow. Also, a robust flight control based on the use of a control law that improves the maneuverability of the quadrotors has been designed. A set of field tests was performed in order to analyze all the capabilities of the system, from task negotiations to final performance. These experiments also allowed testing control robustness under different weather conditions

Autonomous, Collaborative, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Search and Rescue

Search and Rescue is a vitally important subject, and one which can be improved through the use of modern technology. This work presents a number of advances aimed towards the creation of a swarm of autonomous, collaborative, unmanned aerial vehicles for land-based search and rescue. The main advances are the development of a diffusion based search strategy for route planning, research into GPS (including the Durham Tracker Project and statistical research into altitude errors), and the creation of a relative positioning system (including discussion of the errors caused by fast-moving units). Overviews are also given of the current state of research into both UAVs and Search and Rescue

Tag Recognition for Quadcopter Drone Movement

Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) drone such as Parrot AR.Drone 2.0 is a flying mobile robot which has been popularly researched for the application of search and rescue mission. In this project, Robot Operating System (ROS), a free open source platform for developing robot control software is used to develop a tag recognition program for drone movement. ROS is popular with mobile robotics application development because sensors data transmission for robot control system analysis will be very handy with the use of ROS nodes and packages once the installation and compilation is done correctly. It is expected that the drone can communicate with a laptop via ROS nodes for sensors data transmission which will be further analyzed and processed for the close-loop control system. The developed program consisting of several packages is aimed to demonstrate the recognition of different tags by the drone which will be transformed into a movement command with respect to the tag recognized; in other words, a visual-based navigation program is developed

Virtual reality simulation of a quadrotor to monitor dependent people at home

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) represent an assistance solution for home care of dependent persons. These aircraft can cover the home, accompany the person, and position themselves to take photographs that can be analyzed to determine the person's mood and the assistance needed. In this context, this work principally aims to design a tool to aid in the development and validation of the navigation algorithms of an autonomous vision-based UAV for monitoring dependent people. For that, a distributed architecture has been proposed based on the real-time communication of two modules, one of them in charge of the dynamics of the UAV, the trajectory planning and the control algorithms, and the other devoted to visualizing the simulation in an immersive virtual environment. Thus, a system has been developed that allows the evaluation of the behavior of the assistant UAV from a technological point of view, as well as to carry out studies from the assisted person's viewpoint. An initial validation of a quadrotor model monitoring a virtual character demonstrates the advantages of the proposed system, which is an effective, safe and adaptable tool for the development of vision-based UAVs to help dependents at home.This work was partially supported by Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades, Agencia Estatal de Investigación/European Regional Development Fund under PID2019106084RB-I00 and DPI2016-80894-R grants, and by CIBERSAM of the Instituto de Salud Carlos III

Aerospace medicine and biology: A continuing bibliography with indexes (supplement 359)

This bibliography lists 164 reports, articles and other documents introduced into the NASA Scientific and Technical Information System during Jan. 1992. Subject coverage includes: aerospace medicine and physiology, life support systems and man/system technology, protective clothing, exobiology and extraterrestrial life, planetary biology, and flight crew behavior and performance