BACKGROUND
In the last decades, micro aerial multi-rotors have proven themselves suitable for a wide variety of applications, such as search and rescue, crop monitoring in agriculture, and load transportation in logistics or constructions, just to name a few.
Several commercial aerial robots are available on the market, which, however, are only partly programmable and/or limited to indoor flight. Among the main challenges when transitioning from an indoor to an outdoor setup are non-controlled environmental conditions and robot localization, which cannot rely on motion-capture systems anymore but is typically achieved using GPS-based and/or vision-based methods.
ASSIGNMENT DESCRIPTION
The main question that this thesis will answer is what the influence is of different environmental conditions (wind, flying over water, in the woods, etc.) on the vision-based outdoor localization of an unmanned aerial robot.
The overarching question will be achieved through the following steps:
- Building a quadrotor from a hardware and software point of view, using the open-hardware and open-source software released at https://github.com/uzh-rpg/agilicious, under the supervision of an expert in the domain
- Extend the software and hardware package in the previous point by installing a GPS receiver on the robot and coding a GPS driver that uses the data coming from the GPS for localization.
- Carrying out outdoor flight tests with the built quadrotor using GPS-based localization
- Carrying out outdoor flight tests with the built quadrotor using vision-based localization in multiple environmental conditions and comparing the results among them and with those obtained in the previous point.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
- Philipp Foehn, Elia Kaufmann, Angel Romero, Robert Penicka, Sihao Sun, Leonard Bauersfeld, Thomas Laengle, Giovanni Cioffi, Yunlong Song, Antonio Loquercio, Davide Scaramuzza, "Agilicious: Open-Source and Open-Hardware Agile Quadrotor for Vision-Based Flight", AAAS Science Robotics, 2022, https://rpg.ifi.uzh.ch/docs/ScienceRobotics22_Foehn.pdf