Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for Wireless Localization in Search and Rescue

This thesis presents how unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can successfully assist in search and rescue (SAR) operations using wireless localization. The zone-grid to partition to capture/detect WiFi probe requests follows the concepts found in Search Theory Method. The UAV has attached a sensor, e.g., WiFi sniffer, to capture/detect the WiFi probes from victims or lost people’s smartphones. Applying the Random-Forest based machine learning algorithm, an estimation of the user\u27s location is determined with a 81.8% accuracy. UAV technology has shown limitations in the navigational performance and limited flight time. Procedures to optimize these limitations are presented. Additionally, how the UAV is maneuvered during flight is analyzed, considering different SAR flight patterns and Li-Po battery consumption rates of the UAV. Results show that controlling the UAV by remote-controll detected the most probes, but it is less power efficient compared to control it autonomously

Towards Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping: a Survey of the Current Research Landscape

Motivated by the tremendous progress we witnessed in recent years, this paper presents a survey of the scientific literature on the topic of Collaborative Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (C-SLAM), also known as multi-robot SLAM. With fleets of self-driving cars on the horizon and the rise of multi-robot systems in industrial applications, we believe that Collaborative SLAM will soon become a cornerstone of future robotic applications. In this survey, we introduce the basic concepts of C-SLAM and present a thorough literature review. We also outline the major challenges and limitations of C-SLAM in terms of robustness, communication, and resource management. We conclude by exploring the area's current trends and promising research avenues.Comment: 44 pages, 3 figure

Air-Aided Communication Between Ground Assets in a Poisson Forest

Ground assets deployed in a cluttered environment with randomized obstacles (e.g., a forest) may experience line of sight (LoS) obstruction due to those obstacles. Air assets can be deployed in the vicinity to aid the communication by establishing two-hop paths between the ground assets. Obstacles that are taller than a position-dependent critical height may still obstruct the LoS between a ground asset and an air asset. In this paper, we provide an analytical framework for computing the probability of obtaining a LoS path in a Poisson forest. Given the locations and heights of a ground asset and an air asset, we establish the critical height, which is a function of distance. To account for this dependence on distance, the blocking is modeled as an inhomogenous Poisson point process, and the LoS probability is its void probability. Examples and closed-form expressions are provided for two obstruction height distributions: uniform and truncated Gaussian. The examples are validated through simulation. Additionally, the end-to-end throughput is determined and shown to be a metric that balances communication distance with the impact of LoS blockage. Throughput is used to determine the range at which it is better to relay communications through the air asset, and, when the air asset is deployed, its optimal height.Comment: Military Communications Conference, MILCOM 202

Collaborative Indoor Positioning Systems: A Systematic Review

Research and development in Collaborative Indoor Positioning Systems (CIPSs) is growing steadily due to their potential to improve on the performance of their non-collaborative counterparts. In contrast to the outdoors scenario, where Global Navigation Satellite System is widely adopted, in (collaborative) indoor positioning systems a large variety of technologies, techniques, and methods is being used. Moreover, the diversity of evaluation procedures and scenarios hinders a direct comparison. This paper presents a systematic review that gives a general view of the current CIPSs. A total of 84 works, published between 2006 and 2020, have been identified. These articles were analyzed and classified according to the described system’s architecture, infrastructure, technologies, techniques, methods, and evaluation. The results indicate a growing interest in collaborative positioning, and the trend tend to be towards the use of distributed architectures and infrastructure-less systems. Moreover, the most used technologies to determine the collaborative positioning between users are wireless communication technologies (Wi-Fi, Ultra-WideBand, and Bluetooth). The predominant collaborative positioning techniques are Received Signal Strength Indication, Fingerprinting, and Time of Arrival/Flight, and the collaborative methods are particle filters, Belief Propagation, Extended Kalman Filter, and Least Squares. Simulations are used as the main evaluation procedure. On the basis of the analysis and results, several promising future research avenues and gaps in research were identified

Past, Present, and Future of Simultaneous Localization And Mapping: Towards the Robust-Perception Age

Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM)consists in the concurrent construction of a model of the environment (the map), and the estimation of the state of the robot moving within it. The SLAM community has made astonishing progress over the last 30 years, enabling large-scale real-world applications, and witnessing a steady transition of this technology to industry. We survey the current state of SLAM. We start by presenting what is now the de-facto standard formulation for SLAM. We then review related work, covering a broad set of topics including robustness and scalability in long-term mapping, metric and semantic representations for mapping, theoretical performance guarantees, active SLAM and exploration, and other new frontiers. This paper simultaneously serves as a position paper and tutorial to those who are users of SLAM. By looking at the published research with a critical eye, we delineate open challenges and new research issues, that still deserve careful scientific investigation. The paper also contains the authors' take on two questions that often animate discussions during robotics conferences: Do robots need SLAM? and Is SLAM solved

Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends and Applications

This book is a printed edition of the Special Issue entitled “Multi-Robot Systems: Challenges, Trends, and Applications” that was published in Applied Sciences. This Special Issue collected seventeen high-quality papers that discuss the main challenges of multi-robot systems, present the trends to address these issues, and report various relevant applications. Some of the topics addressed by these papers are robot swarms, mission planning, robot teaming, machine learning, immersive technologies, search and rescue, and social robotics

Smart Monitoring and Control in the Future Internet of Things

The Internet of Things (IoT) and related technologies have the promise of realizing pervasive and smart applications which, in turn, have the potential of improving the quality of life of people living in a connected world. According to the IoT vision, all things can cooperate amongst themselves and be managed from anywhere via the Internet, allowing tight integration between the physical and cyber worlds and thus improving efficiency, promoting usability, and opening up new application opportunities. Nowadays, IoT technologies have successfully been exploited in several domains, providing both social and economic benefits. The realization of the full potential of the next generation of the Internet of Things still needs further research efforts concerning, for instance, the identification of new architectures, methodologies, and infrastructures dealing with distributed and decentralized IoT systems; the integration of IoT with cognitive and social capabilities; the enhancement of the sensing–analysis–control cycle; the integration of consciousness and awareness in IoT environments; and the design of new algorithms and techniques for managing IoT big data. This Special Issue is devoted to advancements in technologies, methodologies, and applications for IoT, together with emerging standards and research topics which would lead to realization of the future Internet of Things