Engineering Commons^™

Real Time And High Fidelity Quadcopter Tracking System, Tyler Mckay Hall

Computer Engineering

This project was conceived as a desired to have an affordable, flexible and physically compact tracking system for high accuracy spatial and orientation tracking. Specifically, this implementation is focused on providing a low cost motion capture system for future research. It is a tool to enable the further creation of systems that would require the use of accurate placement of landing pads, payload acquires and delivery. This system will provide the quadcopter platform a coordinate system that can be used in addition to GPS.

Field research with quadcopter manufacturers, photographers, agriculture and research organizations were contact and interviewed for information …

How Law Enforcement Unmanned Aircraft Systems (Uas) Could Improve Tactical Response To Active Shooter Situations: The Case Of The 2017 Las Vegas Shooting, Ryan J. Wallace, Jon M. Loffi

International Journal of Aviation, Aeronautics, and Aerospace

Using a case study methodology, this paper assesses the unique tactical challenges faced by law enforcement officers responding to the October 1, 2017, Las Vegas active shooter incident. The authors assessed the tactical strengths of the assailant, Stephen Paddock, and challenges faced by law enforcement personnel. The authors present several proposed applications of unmanned aircraft systems that could have potentially mitigated the active shooter’s tactical advantages.

Datumate, Purdue Ect Team

ECT Fact Sheets

Datumate is digitally transforming civil engineering processes used in construction, surveying and infrastructure inspection markets with fully automated, highly precise, cost effective and safe tools. It utilizes state-of-the-art image processing and advanced drones and camera technologies dramatically reducing the amount of time surveying crews spend in the field, speeding up construction progress checks and shortening infrastructure inspection duration, while maintaining survey grade accuracy. The intuitive, simple and automated solutions increase productivity by saving field and office time in civil engineering and inspection projects of roads, intersections, stockpile volumes, topography, piping, industrial facilities, bridges, property surveys, building facades, railways, cellular infrastructure …

Integrated Environment And Proximity Sensing For Uav Applications, Shawn S. Brackett

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

As Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), or “drone” applications expand, new methods for sensing, navigating and avoiding obstacles need to be developed. The project applies an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF) to a simulated quadcopter vehicle though Matlab in order to estimate not only the vehicle state but the world state around the vehicle. The EKF integrates multiple sensor readings from range sensors, IMU sensors, and radiation sensors and combines this information to optimize state estimates. The result is an estimated world map to be used in vehicle navigation and obstacle avoidance.

The simulation handles the physics behind the vehicle flight. As …

Customizing Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks To Individual Drivers And Traffic Conditions, Ali Rakhshan

Doctoral Dissertations

This dissertation studies the ability to individualize vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) in order to improve safety. Adapting a VANET to both its individual drivers' characteristics and traffic conditions enables it to transmit in a smart manner to other vehicles. This improvement is now possible due to the progress that is being made in VANETs. To accomplish this adaptation, our approach is to use VANET data to learn drivers' characteristics. This information along with the traffic data, can be used to customize the VANETs to individual drivers. In this dissertation, we show that this process benefits all the drivers by …

X650f Power Enhancement, Joseph Reed, Joe Lund, Donald Yu, Jessica Iglesias, Daniel Ewell

Aviation Technology Undergraduate Student Research

This proposal seeks to define the purpose, goals, and scope of the X650F Power Enhancement project. Five members of Purdue’s Aeronautical Engineering Technology program are leading this project as part of their senior capstone research course. The purpose of said project is to look into the many possibilities of enhancing the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) power supply. This can open doors to several opportunities that can benefit both the Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) program here at Purdue University, as well as the all of the students expected to go into the industry. The ideas looked into include, but are not …

X650f Power Solution, Joseph Reed, Joe Lund, Donald Yu, Jessica Iglesias, Daniel Ewell

Aviation Technology Undergraduate Student Research

This poster presents the problem of how that students coming out of the UAV minor and major are not getting enough flight time in the starting courses such as AT 209 and AT 219. Due to this, they are not as prepared as they should be for the higher level courses such as AT 309 and AT 319. Our end goal is to somehow increase the level of flight time in the earlier courses so that they can be prepared and ready for the next level courses.

Seed Plant Drone For Reforestation, Erico Pinheiro Fortes

The Graduate Review

The desertification issue in the Cape Verde Islands over the past decades has proven to be a very serious problem which concerns the entire archipelago. Erosion, inaccessible land and the lack of field workers is making agricultural production increasingly inefficient. This project seeks to construct a viable and efficient solution to improve the agricultural system and soil erosion issues in the Cape Verde islands. To accomplish this goal, we will build an autonomous flying quadcopter that will mechanically dispense seeds to restore the arid and infertile regions for agriculture.

This project has three deliverables. The first is a custom-built quadcopter …

Sensor Characterization And Signal Fusion For Instanteye, Wyman T. Smith

Honors Theses and Capstones

The practicality and effectiveness of using a TerraRanger Duo—a parallel sonar and infrared time-of-flight distance sensor—payload for obstacle detection is investigated for use with Physical Science Inc.’s InstantEye drone. A Python program was developed to interface with the serial data output before comparing the sensor’s empirical performance against its data sheet. The two signals from the distinct sensor modules, each with their characterized strengths and weaknesses, were then fused with a Kalman filter. This was further refined by imposing conditional weighting based on the known sensor characteristics. The filter output, with conditional corrections, was able to accurately track a single …