A Purpose-Built Robot for Aerial Surveillance

摘要

An autonomous aerial robot is being developed at the University of BritishrnColumbia (UBC) for entry into the Millennial Event of the InternationalrnAerial Robotics Competition. The purpose of this competition is to surveyrna natural disaster scene and identify human casualties and hazards to arnmanned rescue effort. This paper documents the third generation robotrnwhich builds upon knowledge gained from the first two attempts tornproduce a practical, working vehicle.rnThe approach taken by this aerial robotics group was to develop an easilyrncontrollable vehicle to facilitate the control software, rather thanrndeveloping complex control software for an existing vehicle. The UBCrnrobot consists of seven propellers: one main propeller centered around sixrnsmall control propellers. The vehicle is capable of vertical takeoff andrnlanding, hover, and translation or rotation in any direction.rnThe embedded system was designed to control the craft in task spacernbefore the control action is mapped onto the seven actuators. Therncontroller keeps the craft flat and level in all movement modes using thernhorizontal thruster to translate and rotate in the horizontal plane and thernvertical propellers for height and stability control.rnTo accomplish the task of recognizing and locating human casualties andrnhazards, an image recognition system will analyze pictures obtained fromrna high resolution camera system attached to this platform. Although thernvehicle will be programmed to perform a search pattern given a fixedrnboundary, the waypoints can be modified in real-time by the navigationrnprogram to concentrate on areas of interest.