Autonomous Data Collection System Using Intelligent Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Southern California Co

Abstract

The overall objective of this project was to design and develop an autonomous system that is affordable to smaller enterprises and adaptable to a variety of micro-sensors such as chemical sensors, solar radiation sensors, thermal cameras etc. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) can provide real-time access to high quality data in order to quickly and accurately identify problems. They can be used to capture aerial images and develop data maps to inform managers and researchers of logistics. In this paper, we developed an affordable and autonomous data collection system using an UAV that can perform predefined operations such as remote sensing. This system consists of: (i) a multirotor hexacopter (UAV), (ii) a microprocessor (arduino mega), (iii) a partial infrared-color CCD camera, (iv) a temperature and humidity micro-sensor, (v) a wireless transmitter (wifi module), and (vi) a SD memory card. The UAV navigates to its desired destination, conducts its operation (such as collect data from the sensors, take a picture, process and store the data to the SD card), and returns “home”, where the collected data are transmitted wirelessly to a web-database over a WiFi connection. The data from the GPS were used to associate the location, date and time with the temperature and humidity measurements. Topographical maps were created to visualize the collected data. The system was evaluated in the field and data were collected at the predefined location/waypoints (given longitude, latitude and altitude points). The desired path was compared with the data points from the GPS. Additionally, for visual confirmation, symbols were placed at each waypoint in order to evaluate the image location accuracy. This experiment was repeated four times.