Autonomous Lighting Audits: Part 1 — Building Navigation and Mapping

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Bay ◽  
Trevor J. Terrill ◽  
Bryan P. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Autonomous System ◽  
Energy Use ◽  
Autonomous Robots ◽  
Audit Process ◽  
Extensive Training ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Energy Audits ◽  
Unknown Area ◽  
The Cost

Buildings represent a large portion, approximately 40%, of all US energy use and carbon emissions. Significant savings can be found by conducting energy audits of the buildings, but the extensive training and cost of the audits prevent more widespread use. Automating the audit process with robots can greatly reduce the cost and provide more information to give better recommendations. This paper is the first in a series that proposes a system of autonomous robots that can conduct energy audits. Specifically, this paper presents an overview of the autonomous system and details an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) platform which is used to perform automated lighting audits. Also, modifications to an existing exploration algorithm are proposed that will allow autonomous exploration of an unknown, GPS-denied environment while identifying and navigating to targets in real-time. This new algorithm is called SRT-Target. The UAV navigates to the lights, the target objects, in order to take additional measurements so that the light type can be determined. Movement of the UAV can be limited by a calibration factor β to account for sensor capabilities of the target sensor. Simulations of the algorithm show the exploration of the unknown area and the UAV moving to targets as they are identified.

Optimisation Studies for an Efficient Aerodynamic Configuration of a Blended Wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
M.K. Padmanabhan ◽  
G. Santhoshkumar ◽  
Praveen Narayan ◽  
N. Jeevaraj ◽  
M. Dinesh ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Focal Point ◽  
Lift Coefficient ◽  
Innovative Design ◽  
Aerodynamic Efficiency ◽  
Payload Capacity ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Computational Fluid Dynamics Cfd ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Long Endurance

There are various configurations and parameters that contribute to the Design of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles for specific applications. This paper deals with an innovative design of an unmanned aerial vehicle for a specified class of UAVs that require demands such as long endurance, minimized landing space with vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) capabilities. The focal point of this design is superimposing the high endurance blended wing design into tri-copter to address these parameters. The preliminary calculations are initially performed for the blended wing VTOL vehicle based on the required payload capacity and endurance. Superimposing the tri-copter will decrease the aerodynamic efficiency of the vehicle. Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical methods and algorithms to solve complex problems involving fluid flow which will effectively employed to reduce the cost and time during the conceptual and preliminary design stages. CFD analysis was carried out to estimate the major parameters like lift, drag, lift coefficient (CL) and drag coefficient (CD) for various Angle of Attack (AoA) for configurations of blended wing vehicle with and without tri-copter system in the cruise condition. Thus, the vehicle design and propulsion system is effectively optimized using this drag estimation.

Autonomous Lighting Audits: Part 2 — Light Identification and Analysis

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Trevor J. Terrill ◽  
Christopher J. Bay ◽  
Bryan P. Rasmussen
Keyword(s):  
Energy Use ◽  
Building Energy ◽  
Prototype System ◽  
Composite Image ◽  
Light Levels ◽  
Current Implementation ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Energy Audits ◽  
Lighting Analysis ◽  
Combined Data

Buildings are responsible for approximately 40% of all US energy use and carbon emissions. There exists large potential to improve building efficiency through retro-commissioning, but expense and required expertise of building auditors limit current implementation. Autonomous robotic assessments have the potential to provide consistent building energy audits with reduced cost and enhanced capabilities. As a first step in automating building audits, this paper presents work on automating the lighting analysis of a building. As an aerial vehicle navigates and explores a room, the prototype system captures images and collects spectrometer readings. These data are used to quantify and classify lighting in a room. Additionally, images acquired from the optical camera are merged to form a composite image of the area. This composite image is used for navigation to lights to record spectrometer readings. Lighting type is then classified from these spectrometer readings. The combined lighting quantification and classification is used to create a topology map of light levels. The combined data are used to perform a thorough analysis of lighting and make lighting recommendations.

scholarly journals Control and flight test of a tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 172988141667814 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chao Chen ◽  
Jiyang Zhang ◽  
Daibing Zhang ◽  
Lincheng Shen
Keyword(s):  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
High Speed ◽  
Cross Coupling ◽  
Flight Test ◽  
Control Allocation ◽  
Tilt Rotor ◽  
Satisfactory Performance ◽  
Allocation Method ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
The Cost

Tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicles have attracted increasing attention due to their ability to perform vertical take-off and landing and their high-speed cruising abilities, thereby presenting broad application prospects. Considering portability and applications in tasks characterized by constrained or small scope areas, this article presents a compact tricopter configuration tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle with full modes of flight from the rotor mode to the fixed-wing mode and vice versa. The unique multiple modes make the tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle a multi-input multi-output, non-affine, multi-channel cross coupling, and nonlinear system. Considering these characteristics, a control allocation method is designed to make the controller adaptive to the full modes of flight. To reduce the cost, the accurate dynamic model of the tilt-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle is not obtained, so a full-mode flight strategy is designed in view of this situation. An autonomous flight test was conducted, and the results indicate the satisfactory performance of the control allocation method and flight strategy.

scholarly journals Use of ammunition with programmable blasting time in air-defense complex

2020 ◽  
pp. 113-119
Author(s):  
В.В. Воїнов
Keyword(s):  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Air Defense ◽  
Rapid Spread ◽  
Article Analysis ◽  
Wide Availability ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
New Type ◽  
New Challenges ◽  
Vehicle Technologies ◽  
The Cost

The rapid spread and wide availability of unmanned aerial vehicle technologies creates a new type of airborne threat - massive and cheap strike and reconnaissance drones. It creates the new challenges for the army and objects air defense - improving the accuracy of air targets hitting and reducing the cost of ammunition. In article analysis of increasing the possibilities of the small air targets defeating by the available air defense means was done. A significant increase in the efficiency of hitting targets supposed to get by existing anti-aircraft artillery with help by the use of ammunition with programmable blasting time. A number of measures have been proposed to improve existing air defense facilities to enable them to use such type of ammunition.

scholarly journals COMPARATIVE EVALUATION EFFICIENCY OF MOBILE LASER SCANNING AND AERIAL SURVEYING FROM UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLES FOR ROAD SURVEY

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 20-27
Author(s):  
Mikhail Y. Bryn ◽  
◽  
Dinara R. Bashirova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ◽  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Aerial Photography ◽  
Laser Scanning ◽  
Aerial Vehicles ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Road Survey ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Scanning Systems ◽  
Practical Recommendations

The application of mobile laser scanning and aerial photography from unmanned aerial vehicles for shooting highways is considered. The aim of the research was to compare the results of shooting using mobile laser scanning systems and aerial photography from an unmanned aerial vehicle to de-termine the preferred option for shooting a highway. The experimental part of the research was carried out using the following equipment: scanning was performed using the Topcon IP - S2 Compact sys-tem, aerial photography was carried out from the GEOSCAN 201 unmanned aerial vehicle. Based on the comparative tests performed on the section of the A - 121 "Sortavala" highway, a comparative analysis of the data obtained for various indicators was carried out: the speed of the shooting stages, the cost of a set of equipment, the cost of shooting, and the accuracy of the results was evaluated. Practical recommendations for the application of these methods are given, their advantages and disad-vantages are indicated.

Integrating Task and Motion Planning for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

2014 ◽  
Vol 02 (01) ◽  
pp. 19-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew S. Cons ◽  
Tal Shima ◽  
Carmel Domshlak
Keyword(s):  
Motion Planning ◽  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Traveling Salesman Problem ◽  
Upper Bound ◽  
Search Algorithm ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
Traveling Salesman ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Path Cost ◽  
The Cost

This paper investigates the problem where a fixed-winged unmanned aerial vehicle is required to find the shortest flyable path to traverse over multiple targets. The unmanned aerial vehicle is modeled as a Dubins vehicle: a vehicle with a minimum turn radius and the inability to go backward. This problem is called the Dubins traveling salesman problem, an extension of the well-known traveling salesman problem. We propose and compare different algorithms that integrate the task planning and the motion planning aspects of the problem, rather than treating the two separately. An upper bound on calculating kinematic satisfying paths for setting costs in the search algorithm is investigated. The proposed integrated algorithms are compared to hierarchical algorithms that solve the search aspect first and then solve the motion planning aspect second. Monte Carlo simulations are performed for a range of vehicle turn radii. The simulations results show the viability of the integrated approach and that using two plausible kinematic satisfying paths as an upper bound to determine the cost-so-far into a search algorithm generally improves performance in terms of the shortest path cost and search complexity.

scholarly journals Economic evaluation of use of unmanned aerial vehicles in Ukraine’s forest management planning

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
I. P. Lakyda ◽  
V. O. Kutskyi
Keyword(s):  
Economic Evaluation ◽  
Forest Management ◽  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicles ◽  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Aerial Photography ◽  
Management Planning ◽  
Forest Management Planning ◽  
Aerial Vehicles ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
The Cost

Today, unmanned aerial vehicles are increasingly used in various sectors of economy, including forestry. Therefore, there is a need for rationing and economic evaluation of these types of activity. Technical standardization of labor is an important stage in the implementation of innovative approaches, technologies, techniques, engineering samples and appliances in all spheres of production. This study serves the purpose of assessing the economic performance of unmanned aerial vehicles at aerial field work during forest management planning activities. The separate unit of the National University of Life and Environmental Sciences of Ukraine “Boiarka Forest Research Station” was identified as the base enterprise. The main analyzed means of technics within the scope of this research is the copter type unmanned aerial vehicle DJI Phantom 4. Based on the data of motion and time study of a quadcopter operator’s shifts, a rational balance of working time of a shift alongside with the normative indicators of labor productivity during aerial photographing activity were calculated. It is possible to adjust the production rate depending on the total travelled distance during a working shift. On the basis of the developed standards of labor productivity, the full prime cost of carrying out aerial photography on an area of 1 ha has been calculated. A comparison of the cost of carrying out aerial photography by means of an unmanned aerial vehicle with the cost of forest management planning and forest certification fieldwork has also been carried out. The results of the study suggest that provided the comparable qualitative and quantitative indicators of the collected data, the use of unmanned aerial vehicles for local clarification of the situation is less expensive compared to surveys by field teams.

scholarly journals Data Measurements and Its Uses for the Autonomous System

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (6) ◽  
pp. 1581-1587
Author(s):  
František Ostřížek ◽  
Oldřich Trenz
Keyword(s):  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Autonomous System ◽  
Limiting Factor ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Fundamental Error ◽  
Problematic Area

This article describes the problematic area of UAV (Unmanned Aerial Vehicle). This device can be used to communicate with corporate IS and other devices, calculation of localisation, mapping of new places which covered with Wi‑Fi technology and many others purposes. Nowadays, trends in the solution of driving and maintenance describe precise localisation. The fundamental error of GPS while using it inside buildings is enormous, and for this reason, we were trying to use infrastructure based on 802.11 a/b/g/n. It takes a focus on the part of measuring of signals and the ability of Wi‑Fi signals processing. A limiting factor for this solution might be an environment with a weak or null signal and situations with a smaller amount of beacons. The primary aim of this article is providing an introduction to the problem of use drones and describe collected data for future use.

scholarly journals ALGORITHM DEVELOPMENT FOR BREAK-EVEN ANALYSIS OF UNMANNED AERIAL VEHICLE

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Muhammad Ridlo Erdata Nasution ◽  
Dhaesa Pramana
Keyword(s):  
Cost Analysis ◽  
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Design Process ◽  
Cost Model ◽  
Unit Price ◽  
Vehicle Design ◽  
Aerial Vehicle ◽  
Break Even Point ◽  
The Cost ◽  
Cost Components

Break-Even Analysis is an important step to be considered in the design process of a product. In order to facilitate this cost analysis in the framework of unmanned aerial vehicle design, a numerical algorithm is proposed and implemented on an in-house software. The developed algorithm adopts the cost components of Modified DAPCA IV Cost Model. It aims to calculate the number of units to achieve Break-Even Point and its corresponding unit price, as well as the obtained profit margin. Three example cases are employed in the assessment of the outcomes of the proposed algorithm, whereby reasonable results and good agreements with theoretical trends are concluded.

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