Towards A Standardized Aerial Platform: ICUAS’22 Firefighting Competition

Abstract

This paper presents an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) platform used for the competition held at the International Conference for Unmanned Aircraft Systems 2022 (ICUAS’22). The envisioned scenario in the competition is delivering an extinguishing ball to a fire with a UAV. Driven on that thought, the qualifying round of the competition is organized in a realistic simulation environment. The competitors are required to navigate through a cluttered environment into a free space, where they perform a search for the target and deliver the ball as close as possible to that target. The competition finals were organized as a part of the conference, with the same goal as in the simulation qualifiers. The UAVs used for the competition are prepared and provided by the organizers. A detailed description of the UAV software and hardware is outlined in the paper as a step towards standardizing aerial research platform.

Constrained PSO-Splines Trajectory Generation for an Indoor Nanodrone

“…We express all the constraints and the objective function from (8) in terms of the UAV trajectory and its derivatives. Taking the trajectory as a B-spline curve (2) with the degree and the knot vector of the basis functions a priori fixed and using over-approximations based on P4), we reformulate the optimization problem only in terms of the control points. Thus, the initial continuoustime (infinite dimensional) optimization problem ( 8) is converted to a finite-dimensional, sub-optimal optimization problem.…”

“…Nowadays, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) are used in various applications including search and rescue [1], firefighting [2] and precision agriculture [3]. The common challenge behind these applications is to generate a feasible trajectory that can be tracked by the UAV.…”