Distributed control and communication for UAVs

• Autor(a) principal: Silva, Rui Emanuel Simões da
• Data de Publicação: 2021
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10773/34069
• topic: Drones; Missions; Fleet management; Decentralization; Network; Android

Drones have been more popular in recent years due to lower prices and a wider range of use cases. They can be used for various purposes, including recreation and more specific activities such as forest monitoring, agriculture, and even in the event of a natural disaster. They are the ideal tool to assist or even substitute a human due to their tiny size, quick deployment and mobility. Autopilots were designed to allow drones to carry out missions without the need for human control. Many different tools have been developed to manage a fleet of drones by tracking their movements and sending instructions. A new approach to these tools has been presented in this Dissertation. Typically, the architectures developed are more centralized, meaning that the drones are always under the control of a ground station. Instead, we devised a method for drones to communicate with one another and make decisions based on real-time data collected during missions, even when they are out of range of the ground station. This was accomplished by creating two separate modules, one for the drones and the other for the ground station. The drone module executes missions, monitoring telemetry and network connectivity with the rest of the fleet, while the ground station module retrieves telemetry from the drones and manages the available drones to perform missions. We have created a method of extending the maximum network range of the platform through relay drones activated through a change on the network metrics. We also devised a method to integrate Android devices into the platform. For example, a person could request a drone using an Android application by placing the order and providing its location. Everything we developed was tested step by step to validate the performed work. First we used simulation tools to verify the work locally before moving on to real hardware testing using physical drones in a real environment, with single drones first, and then with multiple drones in cooperation.