Department Publications

Drones can be very useful in search and rescue missions primarily due to the aerial imaging capability. Drones can assist ground teams searching for a missing person, and law enforcement officers in crowd control. But there are instances where the observer on the ground control station misses the subtle information on the video feed coming from the drone. In fact, it is a very difficult job for the observer to be so vigilant in viewing a lot of images looking for a sign of a human in those images. This paper presents a drone-based human identification system to make search and rescue missions more effective. The drone, once detects signs of human presence in real-time aerial videos, autonomously navigates towards the suspicious location to get a better view to verify human presence. The drone has been made fully autonomous with operator override as an option. It processes images and sends selected frames for …

This paper addresses the problem of high energy consumption in the standard take-off mode of quad-plane unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). In the standard mode, the quad-plane takes-off vertically using the quad mode, and when the predefined altitude is reached the plane mode kicks in. However, the" bird" mode, where both quad and plane modes kick in together, the UAV could achieve altitude and airspeed while consuming lower energy. This paper presents the energy consumption and comparison in standard and bird take-off modes with actual experimental results obtained through flight tests of a small 1.35 kg quad-plane. The experiments showed that as much as 22% energy can be saved if the bird take-off mode is used.

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) commonly referred to as drones are becoming the attractive solution that provides wireless connectivity in a situation wherever the standard terrestrial base station is burden with high data traffic or unreachable in a disaster scenario. Our work examines the problem of best deployment of the UAVs as an aerial base station to empower wireless coverage to the users in the coverage less area. The foremost contributions of this study incorporate couple of strategies to deploy the ABSs and associate the UEs to the best ABS, where the total spectral efficiency of the network is maximized. Approaches will be chosen considering the prevailing environmental condition and system constraints. The first strategy uses an unsupervised clustering algorithm to determine the 2D positioning of the UAV ((x, y) coordinates) and a stable marriage approach is used for UE assignment by …