An Onboard Vision-Based System for Autonomous Landing of a Low-Cost Quadrotor on a Novel Landing Pad

Savkin

2020

Sensors

This paper proposes a novel parcel delivery system which consists of a drone and public transportation vehicles such as trains, trams, etc. This system involves two delivery schemes: drone-direct scheme referring to delivering to a customer by a drone directly and drone–vehicle collaborating scheme referring to delivering a customer based on the collaboration of a drone and public transportation vehicles. The fundamental characteristics including the delivery time, energy consumption and battery recharging are modelled, based on which a time-dependent scheduling problem for a single drone is formulated. It is shown to be NP-complete and a dynamic programming-based exact algorithm is presented. Since its computational complexity is exponential with respect to the number of customers, a sub-optimal algorithm is further developed. This algorithm accounts the time for delivery and recharging, and it first schedules the customer which leads to the earliest return. Its computational complexity is also discussed. Moreover, extensive computer simulations are conducted to demonstrate the scheduling performance of the proposed algorithms and the impacts of several key system parameters are investigated.

Section: Sub-optimal Algorithmmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Scheduling of a Parcel Delivery System Consisting of an Aerial Drone Interacting with Public Transportation Vehicles

Savkin

2020

Sensors

“…where w j represent the weights to be calculated. Using the Lagrange multipliers, the variance is minimized when [83]:…”

Section: Finding the Short-range Markersmentioning

confidence: 99%

Methodology for Indoor Positioning and Landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in a Smart Manufacturing Plant for Light Part Delivery

et al. 2020

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are spreading their usage in many areas, including last-mile distribution. In this research, a UAV is used for performing light parts delivery to workstation operators within a manufacturing plant, where GPS is no valid solution for indoor positioning. A generic localization solution is designed to provide navigation using RFID received signal strength measures and sonar values. A system on chip computer is onboarded with two missions: first, compute positioning and provide communication with backend software; second, provide an artificial vision system that cooperates with UAV’s navigation to perform landing procedures. An Industrial Internet of Things solution is defined for workstations to allow wireless mesh communication between the logistics vehicle and the backend software. Design is corroborated through experiments that validate planned solutions.

“…Indoors, which is characterized as a GPS-denied environment, data-sharing with the Pixhawk4 is highly dependent on the sensor type. Typically, indoor tracking for drones is achieved using a motion capture system [ 18 , 28 ], where the micro air vehicle communication protocol on the ROS framework (MAVROS) helps share the external sensory data with Pixhawk4. We responded with a similar approach, but the sensor measurement is acquired by the UWB sensor network.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

A UWB-Based Lighter-Than-Air Indoor Robot for User-Centered Interactive Applications

Naheem¹,

Elsharkawy²,

Koo³

et al. 2022

Sensors

Features such as safety and longer flight times render lighter-than-air robots strong candidates for indoor navigation applications involving people. However, the existing interactive mobility solutions using such robots lack the capability to follow a long-distance user in a relatively larger indoor space. At the same time, the tracking data delivered to these robots are sensitive to uncertainties in indoor environments such as varying intensities of light and electromagnetic field disturbances. Regarding the above shortcomings, we proposed an ultra-wideband (UWB)-based lighter-than-air indoor robot for user-centered interactive applications. We developed the data processing scheme over a robot operating system (ROS) framework to accommodate the robot’s integration needs for a user-centered interactive application. In order to explore the user interaction with the robot at a long-distance, the dual interactions (i.e., user footprint following and user intention recognition) were proposed by equipping the user with a hand-held UWB sensor. Finally, experiments were conducted inside a professional arena to validate the robot’s pose tracking in which 3D positioning was compared with the 3D laser sensor, and to reveal the applicability of the user-centered autonomous following of the robot according to the dual interactions.