DroneVLC: Exploiting Drones and VLC to Gather Data from Batteryless Sensors

We explore a new alternative for drones to gather information from sensors. Instead of using the traditional radio-frequency spectrum, whose broadcast nature makes it more difficult to poll specific objects, we utilize the light spectrum. In our system, the drone carries a light, and flies to an area that it is interested in polling. Only the...

Improving the computational efficiency of ROVIO

ROVIO is one of the state-of-the-art mono visual inertial odometry algorithms. It uses an Iterative Extended Kalman Filter (IEKF) to align features and update the vehicle state simultaneously by including the feature locations in the state vector of the IEKF. This algorithm is single core intensive, which allows using the other cores for other...

Preface

INDI Control for the ObliqueWing-Quad Plane Drone

A type of UAV sharing the advantages of rotorcraft and fixed wing vehicles is the hybrid vehicle. Hybrid UAVs can take-off and land vertically and fly fast and efficient in forward flight due to the presence of a wing generating lift. However, combining the fixed wing and rotorcraft concept ends up in a multi-rotor with large dimensions when...

Design and joint control of a conjoined biplane and quadrotor

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have the potential to perform many different missions, some of which may require a large aircraft for endurance and a small aircraft for manoeuvrability in a building. This paper proposes a novel combination of a quadrotor and a hybrid biplane capable of joint hover, joint forward flight, and mid-air disassembly...

3D Path Planning for UAVs in Dynamic Environments in the Presence of Uncertainties

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are being integrated into all spheres of life, for a wide range of application in civil, commercial and military applications in both indoor and outdoor environments. UAV onboard intelligence is a paramount requirement in the realisation of UAV Traffic Management System (UTM) and Air Traffic Management (ATM)...

Flight code convergence: fixedwing, rotorcraft, hybrid

Rotorcraft, fixed wing and hybrid Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV) each have applications in which they excel. Traditionally, dedicated autopilot control code is written to accommodate flight of each UAV type. This causes fragmentation of control code and may lead to performance differences or errors. In this paper, we propose to use the same INDI...

Attitude modeling of the DelftaCopter: a system identification approach

Previous years have seen a rise in the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Reaching a large endurance and range while being able to perform Vertical Take-Off and Landing (VTOL) landings allows a broad range of applications. For this purpose the DelftaCopter (DC) was developed, a tilt-body tailsitter UAV. It hovers using a single helicopter...

Analysis of Pedestrian Crowd Movements at Lowlands

Several pedestrian crowd events that became disasters occurred in the last decade. Most of these events were either religious festivals, sport or music events. Even though these events are organized frequently, not a lot is known about pedestrian crowd movements. One of the key problems in the analysis is the lack of crowd movement data....