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Development of a Guidance System for Cloud Controlled Drones - A step towards drone automation
The focus of the thesis is to develop a guidance system for drones for easy transitioning from an outside environment with a global positioning system (GPS) to an indoor environment with a local positioning system (VirtualRails). The drone should be able to fly from an indoor ”drone garage” into ope
The emergence of consumer drones over the last couple of years has led to high media coverage and drone awareness in the public eye. These developments sparked the interest of diverse industries, as the business potential of drones is undeniably huge. Current application industries range from the film business to inspection, surveillance to agriculture and further. Science-Fiction-like scenarios with delivery drones buzzing along the city skyline don’t seem that far fetched anymore.
However, apart from legal issues and safety concerns, drone automation is still facing interesting problems from a technical point of view. Accurate Positioning of drones nowadays mostly relies on GPS, which makes it hard to fly in GPS-denied areas such as street canyons and indoor environments. In this thesis, we tackle drone control at the intersection of public space and “drone garages”. Such a system could be used to build landing spaces for the last mile in package delivery or provide ways for drone fleet storage and management in the agriculture sector .
The emergence of consumer drones over the last couple of years has led to high media coverage and drone awareness in the public eye. These developments sparked the interest of diverse industries, as the business potential of drones is undeniably huge. Current application industries range from the film business to inspection, surveillance to agriculture and further. Science-Fiction-like scenarios with delivery drones buzzing along the city skyline don’t seem that far fetched anymore. However, apart from legal issues and safety concerns, drone automation is still facing interesting problems from a technical point of view. Accurate Positioning of drones nowadays mostly relies on GPS, which makes it hard to fly in GPS-denied areas such as street canyons and indoor environments. In this thesis, we tackle drone control at the intersection of public space and “drone garages”. Such a system could be used to build landing spaces for the last mile in package delivery or provide ways for drone fleet storage and management in the agriculture sector .
The focus of the thesis is to develop a guidance system for drones for easy transitioning from an outside environment with a global positioning system (GPS) to an indoor environment with a local positioning system (VirtualRails). The drone should be able to fly from an indoor ”drone garage” into open air space and vice versa.
In a first step, the student tackles the problem of seamlessly switching the reference control frame of the drone. This includes vision-based recognition of the guidance system from afar and mapping it into the current GPS space. Then fusing the GPS measurements with the vision based measurements to get an improved estimation of the drone state.
Additionally, connectivity of the drone along the whole mission has to be ensured. Possible approaches would be 4G based communication (outdoors) and the use of a leaky feeder cable for indoors.
In a second step, the student investigates how the drone control responsibility transfers from the docking station to the outdoor environment. For this, the existing MPCC control code base should be reinterpreted and implemented on a cloud based control server.
The focus of the thesis is to develop a guidance system for drones for easy transitioning from an outside environment with a global positioning system (GPS) to an indoor environment with a local positioning system (VirtualRails). The drone should be able to fly from an indoor ”drone garage” into open air space and vice versa.
In a first step, the student tackles the problem of seamlessly switching the reference control frame of the drone. This includes vision-based recognition of the guidance system from afar and mapping it into the current GPS space. Then fusing the GPS measurements with the vision based measurements to get an improved estimation of the drone state. Additionally, connectivity of the drone along the whole mission has to be ensured. Possible approaches would be 4G based communication (outdoors) and the use of a leaky feeder cable for indoors. In a second step, the student investigates how the drone control responsibility transfers from the docking station to the outdoor environment. For this, the existing MPCC control code base should be reinterpreted and implemented on a cloud based control server.