Deployment and navigation of aerial drones for sensing and interacting applications

Abstract

Existing research recognises the critical role played by Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) (also referred to as drones) to numerous civilian applications. Typical drone applications include surveillance, wireless communication, agriculture, among many others. One of the biggest challenges is to determine the deployment and navigation of the drones to benefit the most for different applications. Many research questions have been raised about this topic. For example, drone-enabled wildlife monitoring has received much attention in recent years. Unfortunately, this approach results in significant disturbance to different species of wild animals. Moreover, with the capability of rapidly moving communication supply towards demand when required, the drone equipped with a base station, i.e., drone-cell, is becoming a promising solution for providing cellular networks to victims and rescue teams in disaster-affected areas. However, few studies have investigated the optimal deployments of multiple drone-cells with limited backhaul communication distances. In addition, the use of autonomous drones as flying interactors for many real-life applications has not been sufficiently discussed. With superior maneuverability, drone-enabled autonomous aerial interacting can potentially be used on shark attack prevention and animal herding. Nevertheless, previous studies of autonomous drones have not dealt with such applications in much detail. This thesis explores the solutions to all the mentioned research questions, with a particular focus on the deployment and navigation of the drones. First, we provide one of the first investigations into reducing the negative impacts of wildlife monitoring drones by navigation control. Second, we study the optimal placement of a group of drone-cells with limited backhaul communication ranges, aims to maximise the number of served users. Third, we propose a novel method named ‘drone shark shield’, which uses communicating autonomous drones to intervene and prevent shark attacks for protecting swimmers and surfers. Lastly, we introduce one of the first autonomous drone herding systems for mustering a large number of farm animals efficiently. Simulations have been conducted to verify the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. We believe that our findings in this thesis shed new light on the fundamental benefits of autonomous civilian drones