Title: A system for application development using aerial robots

Authors: Mohammad Fraiwan; Ahmad Alsaleem; Hashem Abandeh; Omar Aljarrah

Addresses: Department of Computer Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 3030, Irbid 22110, Jordan ' Department of Computer Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 3030, Irbid 22110, Jordan ' Department of Computer Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 3030, Irbid 22110, Jordan ' Department of Computer Engineering, Jordan University of Science and Technology, P.O. Box 3030, Irbid 22110, Jordan

Abstract: Autonomous airborne systems have generated a lot of interest in civilian, as well as military applications. The application development process for such systems is inherently expensive and is prone to costly errors. The majority of the developed applications involve routing and navigation toward targets coupled with obstacle avoidance. In this paper, we present the approach and algorithms that were employed to tackle the routing and avoidance problems. The proposed solutions were applied to land-based robots as well as a quad-rotor aerial system. The quad-rotor flight path navigation and routing was programmed based on GPS and on-board measurement data. Obstacle avoidance was implemented based on an algorithm that relies on the idea of virtual potential field. Kalman filters were implemented to improve the accuracy of the measured data. 3D visualisation was used to visually identify obstacles. In the case of in-building reconnaissance, where GPS signals are very weak and largely useless, data from laser sensors and proximity feeds was aggregated and processed to identify obstacles and the topology of the surrounding environment. The organisation and interaction of these various modules is described in detail.

Keywords: quad-rotor; obstacle avoidance; Kalman filter; maps; potential field.

DOI: 10.1504/IJES.2018.095750

International Journal of Embedded Systems, 2018 Vol.10 No.6, pp.494 - 502

Received: 18 May 2016
Accepted: 04 Sep 2016
Published online: 22 Oct 2018 *

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