Engineering Commons^™

On-Board Artificial Intelligence For Failure Detection And Safe Trajectory Generation, Eduardo Morillo

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

The use of autonomous flight vehicles has recently increased due to their versatility and capability of carrying out different type of missions in a wide range of flight conditions. Adequate commanded trajectory generation and modification, as well as high-performance trajectory tracking control laws have been an essential focus of researchers given that integration into the National Air Space (NAS) is becoming a primary need. However, the operational safety of these systems can be easily affected if abnormal flight conditions are present, thereby compromising the nominal bounds of design of the system's flight envelop and trajectory following. This thesis focuses on …

Estimation Of Cotton Canopy Parameters Based On Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (Uav) Oblique Photography, Jinyong Wu, Sheng Wen, Yubin Lan, Xuanchun Yin, Jiantao Zhang, Yufeng Ge

Department of Agricultural and Biological Systems Engineering: Faculty Publications

Background: The technology of cotton defoliation is essential for mechanical cotton harvesting. Agricultural unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) spraying has the advantages of low cost, high efficiency and no mechanical damage to cotton and has been favored and widely used by cotton planters in China. However, there are also some problems of low cotton defoliation rates and high impurity rates caused by unclear spraying amounts of cotton defoliants. The chemical rate recommendation and application should be based upon crop canopy volume rather than on land area. Plant height and leaf area index (LAI) is directly connected to plant canopy structure. …

Cad-Based Aerial Trajectory Generation And 3d Mapping For Close-Quarter Inspection, Angel Guillermo Ortega Castillo

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Robotic technologies for inspection purposes of large-scale structures have grown in interest.Such technologies are encouraged to reduce the risk in which human operators are involved and to reduce costs due to downtime of the equipment. In the Energy sector, high interest is placed on power plant components where their correct operation is paramount. This work is inspired by the synthetic vision systems for aerial vehicles that use three-dimensional space (3D) to provide pilots with clear and intuitive means of understanding their flying environment. This work can be separated into three main sections: Trajectory Generation from Computer-Aided Design (CAD) Models, Crack …

Uav Rapidly-Deployable Stage Sensor With Electro-Permanent Magnet Docking Mechanism For Flood Monitoring In Undersampled Watersheds, Corinne A, Smith, Joud Satme, Jacob Martin, Austin Downey, Nikolaos Vitzilaios, Jasim Imran

Faculty Publications

The availability of historical flood data is vital in recognizing weather-related trends and outlining necessary precautions for at-risk communities. Flood frequency, magnitude, endurance, and volume are traditionally recorded using established streamgages; however, the material and installation costs allow only a few streamgages in a region, which yield a narrow data selection. In particular, stage, the vertical water height in a water body, is an important parameter in determining flood trends. This work investigates a low-cost, compact, rapidly-deployable alternative to traditional stage sensors that will allow for denser sampling within a watershed and a more detailed record of flood events. The …

Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Navigation Using Reinforcement Learning: A Systematic Review, Fadi Almahamid, Katarina Grolinger

Electrical and Computer Engineering Publications

There is an increasing demand for using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV), known as drones, in different applications such as packages delivery, traffic monitoring, search and rescue operations, and military combat engagements. In all of these applications, the UAV is used to navigate the environment autonomously --- without human interaction, perform specific tasks and avoid obstacles. Autonomous UAV navigation is commonly accomplished using Reinforcement Learning (RL), where agents act as experts in a domain to navigate the environment while avoiding obstacles. Understanding the navigation environment and algorithmic limitations plays an essential role in choosing the appropriate RL algorithm to solve the …

Precision Maritime Localization And Landing With Real-Time Kinematic Gnss, Alexander Jordan, Matthew Kent Rydalch, Tim Mclain, Michael Williamson Tabango

Student Works

This paper presents a highly effective method for UAV precision shipboard localization and landing using Real-time Kinematic Global Navigation Satellite System (RTK GNSS). To assess the feasibility of RTK GNSS for this use case we explicitly exclude vision-based localization techniques which are most often presented in the literature. Instead, the methods presented in this paper use only RTK GNSS with an inertial measurement unit aboard the landing pad to estimate the state of the boat and the relative position of the UAV with respect to the boat. We use a continuous-discrete extended Kalman filter combined with a complementary filter for …

Human Detection From Aerial Imagery For Search And Rescue Operations, Namat Ahmad Bachir

Theses

Mountain recreation is becoming more popular with mountaineering, rock climbing, skiing, mountain biking, hiking, and mushroom picking among the most popular sports. Despite this tendency, there is currently limited research available explaining the rise in search and rescue (SAR), as well as the injuries and illnesses that entail SAR aid in tourist-friendly mountain and desert areas. The objective of a search and rescue operation is to scan the farthest area feasible in the shortest amount of time in order to locate a lost or wounded individual. In the past decade, several new and spectacular uses for drones, including search and …

Low-Cost Uav Swarm For Real-Time Object Detection Applications, Joel Valdovinos Miranda

Master's Theses

With unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, becoming readily available and affordable, applications for these devices have grown immensely. One type of application is the use of drones to fly over large areas and detect desired entities. For example, a swarm of drones could detect marine creatures near the surface of the ocean and provide users the location and type of animal found. However, even with the reduction in cost of drone technology, such applications result costly due to the use of custom hardware with built-in advanced capabilities. Therefore, the focus of this thesis is to compile an …

Outdoor Operations Of Multiple Quadrotors In Windy Environment, Deepan Lobo

Dissertations

Coordinated multiple small unmanned aerial vehicles (sUAVs) offer several advantages over a single sUAV platform. These advantages include improved task efficiency, reduced task completion time, improved fault tolerance, and higher task flexibility. However, their deployment in an outdoor environment is challenging due to the presence of wind gusts. The coordinated motion of a multi-sUAV system in the presence of wind disturbances is a challenging problem when considering collision avoidance (safety), scalability, and communication connectivity. Performing wind-agnostic motion planning for sUAVs may produce a sizeable cross-track error if the wind on the planned route leads to actuator saturation. In a multi-sUAV …

Design And Control Of Next-Generation Uavs For Effectively Interacting With Environments, Caiwu Ding

Dissertations

In this dissertation, the design and control of a novel multirotor for aerial manipulation is studied, with the aim of endowing the aerial vehicle with more degrees of freedom of motion and stability when interacting with the environments. Firstly, it presents an energy-efficient adaptive robust tracking control method for a class of fully actuated, thrust vectoring unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) with parametric uncertainties including unknown moment of inertia, mass and center of mass, which would occur in aerial maneuvering and manipulation. The effectiveness of this method is demonstrated through simulation. Secondly, a humanoid robot arm is adopted to serve as …

Development And Optimization Of Classification Neural Networks For Disaster-Assessment Using Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Systems, Maria Isabel Gonzalez Bocanegra

Honors College Theses

This research focuses on increasing the classification accuracy of convolutional neural networks in an autonomous network of unmanned aerial vehicles for transportation disaster management. The autonomous network of UAVs will allow first responders to optimize their rescue plans by providing relevant information on inaccessible roads. The research seeks to explore different methods to optimize the architecture of convolutional networks for the multiclass classification of disaster-damaged roads.

Using Flight Simulation As A Convenient Method For Uas Flight Assessment For Contractors, Colin Dees, Joseph M. Burgett

The Professional Constructor

Operating an unmanned aircraft system (UAS) for commercial purposes in the United States requires the pilot to pass the Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) knowledge exam to earn their UAS license. The exam does not include a practical component where flight proficiency is assessed. This represents a source of risk for contractors if flight proficiency is not evaluated in another way. The National Institute of Standards and Technology is a federal agency and has developed the Basic Maneuvering Test (BMT). It is the only nationally recognized UAS flight proficiency exam. While not required, the construction industry can benefit by using this …

Planning And Analysis On Uav Trajectory Based On Pce Method, Sijie Zeng, Yan Liang, Xiaojun Duan

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: Focusing on the uncertainty in the UAV trajectory planning, combined with the artificial potential energy method, a UAV trajectory planning method based on polynomial chaos expansion (PCE), which can also efficiently obtain the optimal parameters of the model based on artificial potential field method is proposed. The PCE proxy model is established, and the stochastic collocation method is used to quickly solve the problem, so as to avoid the insufficient computing resources. Through the Sobol sensitivity analysis, the calculation overhead of the uncertainty parameters in the trajectory planning model is reduced. Cases of UAV trajectory planning prove the effectiveness …

Formation Control With Collision Avoidance For Fixed-Wing Unmanned Air Vehicles With Speed Constraints, Christopher Heintz

Theses and Dissertations--Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering

Advances in the miniaturization of powerful electronic components and motors, the democratization of global navigation satellite systems (GNSS), and improvements in the performance, safety, and cost in lithium batteries has led to the proliferation of small and relatively inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Many of these UAVs are of the multi-rotor design, however, fixed-wing designs are often more efficient than rotary-wing aircraft, leading to a reduction in the power required for a UAV of a given mass to stay airborne. Autonomous cooperation between multiple UAVs would enable them to complete objectives that would be difficult or impossible for a single …

Above-Ground Biomass Estimation In Oat Breeding Nurseries Using Uav-Based Multispectral Data, Rakshya Dhakal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Conventional methods of phenotyping for above-ground biomass under field conditions are time consuming, costly, and labor intensive. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) offer a rapid and non-destructive approach for collecting high temporal and spatial resolution imagery of multiple field plots. Vegetation indices (VIs) can be derived from those imagery and have been used broadly for high-throughput biomass estimation, however, they suffer from spectrum saturation issues at high canopy density. In addition, VIs only reflect the canopy spectral information and fail to incorporate the 3-dimensional (3D) canopy structure and architecture information. It also ignores the spatial relationship of pixels to each other …

Precise Landing Of Vtol Uavs Using A Tether, Jeremy W. Rathjen

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also known as drones, are often considered the solution to complex robotics problems. The significant freedom to explore an environment is a major reason why UAVs are a popular choice for automated solutions. UAVs, however, have a very limited flight time due to the low capacity and weight ratio of current batteries. One way to extend the vehicles' flight time is to use a tether to provide power from external batteries, generators on the ground, or another vehicle. Attaching a tether to a vehicle may constrain its navigation but it may also create some opportunities for …

Application Of Unmanned Aerial Vehicle In Surface Soil Characterization And Geological Disaster Monitoring In Mining Areas, Long Linli, Liu Ying, Zhang Xuyang, Su Yongdong, Chen Xiaoyang

Coal Geology & Exploration

With the emergence and development of UAVs and the improvement of the miniaturization and intelligence of various sensor, UAVs equipped with sensors have become an efficient tool for obtaining spatial data. Because UAVs are low cost, short revisit period, fast and efficient, light and flexible, simple operation, and high temporal and spatial accuracy of image acquisition, it is widely used in mining land damage monitoring. Using "UAV, Inversion, Soil Monitoring, Surface Collapse, Ground Fissure" as keywords, this paper summarizes the academic papers of the search system in the web of science, CNKI, and Google Scholar from January 2010 to May …

A Visually Realistic Simulator For Autonomous Evtol Aircraft, Seth M. Nielsen

Theses and Dissertations

Electrically powered vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft could provide a new mode of air transportation of people and cargo that is low-cost, on-demand, and able to reach more areas than is possible with current technology. They have the unique ability to takeoff and land in congested spaces yet efficiently travel long distances which makes them a promising technology for applications such as rapid medical assistance, automated package delivery, or human transportation. This type of aircraft has only recently become a possibility, owing to advancements in battery technology, computing power, and sensor technologies, and thus support for eVTOLs is lacking …

Determination Of Guidance Laws For Uav Systems In Communication Networks Using Collision Cone Theory, Utsav Mudgal

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Theses - Archive

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), also commonly known as drones, are used in various applications, including military applications such as surveillance and intelligence-gathering as well as civilian applications such as search and rescue. The use of UAVs to form communication networks is a topic of active research interest. This thesis aims to investigate the development of guidance laws for multiple UAVs to form such communication networks. Toward this end, this thesis employs tools from collision cone theory and incorporates them with parameters used to describe a communication network. Different types of networks are evaluated for use of the guidance laws. Simulation …

Autonomous Guidance Of Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles In Basic Fighter Maneuvering, Jeffery G. Dean

Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Dissertations - Archive

Basic fighter maneuvering, or BFM, is the dynamic engagement of two or more aircraft in close-range air combat. The relatively recent introduction of advanced unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAVs) has opened the possibility for automated systems to be players in this arena of air-to-air combat, which has thus far been limited to manned aircraft. In order to design an unmanned system that could fight and win a BFM engagement, the system must include an advanced system for guidance. This dissertation leverages techniques from gain scheduling and incorporates adjustable aimpoint guidance, in order to address the capability for UCAVs to execute …

Tradespace Exploration Of A Uav Conceptual Design Using Model-Based Systems Engineering, Ayan Srivastava

All Theses

The objective of this research is to apply model-based systems engineering approaches to the conceptual design of unmanned aerial vehicles. This is accomplished by evaluating the models of aircraft performance, extracting input and output parameters from the models, creating chains of models, and implementing the models in the MATLAB programming language. By following this process, it is possible to identify the global parameters that remain constant across models, the shared input parameters, the dependencies between models, and the feedback loops with the systems models.

The models are currently implemented in two files using Microsoft MS Excel, one is focused on …

Sensitivity Study For Uav Gps-Denied Navigation In Uncertain Landmark Fields, Samantha D. Burton

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

This document provides two 2D simulation sensitivity analyses regarding a drone’s flight characteristic (state) errors within a GPS-denied region. The research focuses on a development and investigation of utilizing a camera to simultaneously determine a drone’s state while locating landmarks, where there is uncertainty in the landmarks’ exact positions prior to the mission (SLAM). This SLAM method is performed in regions with limited access to GPS. Furthermore, there is development and investigation of controlling the drone in conjunction with SLAM using potential error-reducing control parameters. Objectives are to quantitatively understand the UAV’s sensitivity of position errors to sensor grade and …

Improvement Opportunities In The Two-Source Energy Balance Model For Et Using Uav Imagery And Point Cloud Information, Mahyar Aboutalebi

All Graduate Theses and Dissertations, Spring 1920 to Summer 2023

In recent years, satellites and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) provide enormous amounts of spatially-distributed information for monitoring crop conditions by measuring crop’s reflected and emitted radiation at a distance. However, applications of high-resolution UAV imagery and its intermediate products for improving crop water use estimates are not well studied. In other words, the available approaches, methods and algorithms for determining how much water to apply for irrigation using remotely sensed data have been mostly developed at satellite spatial resolutions. High-resolution imageries that have been achieved by small UAVs open new opportunities for revisiting, re-evaluating, and revising available crop water use …

An Equivalent Method Of Uav Simulating High-Altitude Reconnaissance Equipment Optical Imaging, Jiangang Tu, Xu Cheng, Wang Hui, Zenghui Shen

Journal of System Simulation

Abstract: Aiming at the situation that the actual image of enemy reconnaissance equipment is difficult to be obtained, and the process of using similar equipment of our army is complicated and expensive in the detection of the camouflage effect of our important military targets, an equivalent detection method of using the UAV aerial photography to generate the high-altitude optical reconnaissance images is proposed. The number of pixels in the equivalent image is determined by comparing the acquisition height and the optical imaging device’s parameters of the UAV and the high-altitude reconnaissance equipment. The compressed pixel value is calculated through the …

Rf Fingerprinting Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, Norah Ondus

Doctoral Dissertations and Master's Theses

As unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) continue to become more readily available, their use in civil, military, and commercial applications is growing significantly. From aerial surveillance to search-and-rescue to package delivery the use cases of UAVs are accelerating. This accelerating popularity gives rise to numerous attack possibilities for example impersonation attacks in drone-based delivery, in a UAV swarm, etc. In order to ensure drone security, in this project we propose an authentication system based on RF fingerprinting. Specifically, we extract and use the device-specific hardware impairments embedded in the transmitted RF signal to separate the identity of each UAV. To achieve …

Detecting Invasive Insects Using Uncewed Aerial Vehicles And Variational Autoencoders, Scott Daniel Stewart

Master's Theses (2009 -)

In this thesis, we use machine learning techniques to address limitations in our ability to monitor pest insect migrations. Invasive insect populations, such as the brown marmorated stink bug (BMSB), cause significant economic and environmental damages. In order to mitigate these damages, tracking BMSB migration is vital, but it also poses a challenge. The current state-of-the-art solution to track insect migrations is called mark-release-recapture. In mark-release-recapture, a researcher marks insects with a fluorescent powder, releases them back into the wild, and searches for the insects using ultra-violet flashlights at suspected migration destination locations. However, this involves a significant amount of …

Robust Nonlinear Tracking Control For Unmanned Aircraft In The Presence Of Wake Vortex, Petr Kazarin, Vladimir Golubev, William Mackunis, Claudia Moreno

Publications

The flight trajectory of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can be significantly affected by external disturbances such as turbulence, upstream wake vortices, or wind gusts. These effects present challenges for UAV flight safety. Hence, addressing these challenges is of critical importance for the integration of unmanned aerial systems (UAS) into the National Airspace System (NAS), especially in terminal zones. This work presents a robust nonlinear control method that has been designed to achieve roll/yaw regulation in the presence of unmodeled external disturbances and system nonlinearities. The data from NASA-conducted airport experimental measurements as well as high-fidelity Large Eddy Simulations of the …

Power-Over-Tether Unmanned Aerial System Leveraged For Trajectory Influenced Atmospheric Sensing, Daniel Rico

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

The use of unmanned aerial systems (UASs) in agriculture has risen in the past decade and is helping to modernize agriculture. UASs collect and elucidate data previously difficult to obtain and are used to help increase agricultural efficiency and production. Typical commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) UASs are limited by small payloads and short flight times. Such limits inhibit their ability to provide abundant data at multiple spatiotemporal scales. In this thesis, we describe the design and construction of the tethered aircraft unmanned system (TAUS), which is a novel power-over-tether UAS configured for long-term, high throughput atmospheric monitoring with an array of …

Aerial Flight Paths For Communication, Alisha Bevins

School of Computing: Dissertations, Theses, and Student Research

This body of work presents an iterative process of refinement to understand naive perception of communication using the motion of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV). This includes what people believe the UAV is trying to communicate, and how they expect to respond through physical action or emotional response. Previous work in this area sought to communicate without clear definitions of the states attempting to be conveyed. In an attempt to present more concrete states and better understand specific motion perception, this work goes through multiple iterations of state elicitation and label assignment. The lessons learned in this work will be …

Creating A Field-Wide Forage Canopy Model Using Uavs And Photogrammetry Processing, Cameron Minch, Joseph S. Dvorak, Joshua J. Jackson, Stuart Tucker Sheffield

Biosystems and Agricultural Engineering Faculty Publications

Alfalfa canopy structure reveals useful information for managing this forage crop, but manual measurements are impractical at field-scale. Photogrammetry processing with images from Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) can create a field-wide three-dimensional model of the crop canopy. The goal of this study was to determine the appropriate flight parameters for the UAV that would enable reliable generation of canopy models at all stages of alfalfa growth. Flights were conducted over two separate fields on four different dates using three different flight parameters. This provided a total of 24 flights. The flight parameters considered were the following: 30 m altitude with …