Fraunhofer Center for Assistive Information and Communication Solutions – AICOSDescription:
Over the last years, the increasing technological advances in Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) allowed to expand the concept and applicability of those systems1. UAV are now suitable to be used in a wide range of applications such as Search and Rescue, Surveillance, Aerial Photography and Agriculture. Among the possible applications, autonomous flight in indoor and confined spaces is a challenging scientific topic that is suitable to deliver new insights for ubiquitous user/context monitoring.
In order to operate in tightly constrained environments, there has been a rapid increase of interest in scaling down the size of platforms to develop Nano aerial vehicles3. This interest allowed to extend the UAV applicability to Ambient Assisted Living (AAL) scenarios, where the vehicle can monitor human actions and their behaviour, while ‘listening’ the environment and understanding the context where the user is inserted in.
This project aims to provide the technological infrastructure that is needed to build a solution applied to the Retail Environment. Namely, providing the technological infrastructure means by integrating different modules (e.g. drone, communications, camera, sensors), and developing a route manager and an obstacle avoidance module that allows the drone to fly between previously known landing spots, such as QiTM charging pads. The route manager is a simplified version of a flight control system, that allows to control the drone with high-level commands (e.g. ‘move X meters to the Y direction’, ‘hold position’, etc.).
Author: Eduardo Grifo
Type: MSc thesis
Partner: Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto
Year: 2017
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