Unmanned Aerial Vehicle for landslide investigation in difficult terrain with low cost relay communication network

摘要

The presented research is a results of collaboration of mechanical and civil engineering together to solve a complex but essential engineering problem. Land slide is a major natural disaster in Taiwan. Due to global climate change and excess of infrastructure development, the numbers of land slide happening become often, therefore regular inspection become important. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle is a good tool for aerial inspection and is getting popular in these few years with both price and accessibilities. However, conventional communication method only allow “line of sight”, which only have limited application. This paper describe using state of the art technologies to apply in a real engineering site for land slide inspection before construction work; results of inspection was not completely satisfiable due to certain area were not able to be inspected in real time due to the difficult terrain, hence triggered the development of low cost “non line of sight” communication method for the group of UAVs to extend the communication distance and area. In order to prove of concept, First prototype were set up by one UAV as relay station and one Unmanned Ground Vehicle as mobile robot. Experiments were both carried out inside lab and in field.