An Investigation of Electric Propulsion in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles through a Variable-Fidelity Multidisciplinary Design Optimisation Approach

The medium-altitude long-endurance (MALE) unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) plays a key role in both military and civilian applications around the world. However, in a world where electric UAVs are increasingly becoming the norm, the MALE UAV is still primarily powered by hydrocarbon fuels and its design is very much constrained by existing general...

Low-memory Visual Route Following for Micro Aerial Vehicles in Indoor Environments

This thesis presents a visual route following method that minimizes memory consumption to the point that even Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAV) equipped with only a simple microcontroller can traverse distances of a few hundred meters. Existing Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (SLAM) algorithms are too complex for use on a microcontroller....