A Purpose-Built Robot for Aerial Surveillance

摘要

An autonomous aerial robot is being developed at the University of British Columbia (UBC) for entry into the Millennial Event of the International Aerial Robotics Competition. The purpose of this competition is to survey a natural disaster scene and identify human casualties and hazards to a manned rescue effort. This paper documents the third generation robot which builds upon knowledge gained from the first two attempts to produce a practical, working vehicle. The approach taken by this aerial robotics group was to develop an easily controllable vehicle to facilitate the control software, rather than developing complex control software for an existing vehicle. The UBC robot consists of seven propellers: one main propeller centered around six small control propellers. The vehicle is capable of vertical takeoff and landing, hover, and translation or rotation in any direction. The embedded system was designed to control the craft in task space before the control action is mapped onto the seven actuators. The controller keeps the craft flat and level in all movement modes using the horizontal thruster to translate and rotate in the horizontal plane and the vertical propellers for height and stability control. To accomplish the task of recognizing and locating human casualties and hazards, an image recognition system will analyze pictures obtained from a high resolution camera system attached to this platform. Although the vehicle will be programmed to perform a search pattern given a fixed boundary, the waypoints can be modified in real-time by the navigation program to concentrate on areas of interest.