Autonomous UAVs

Our team is developing the Autonomous UAV Project in partnership with the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computers within the University “Politehnica” of Bucharest; the project undertakes to develop applications and to implement autonomous control techniques for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles.

Within this partnership project, a series of topics are suggested as research topics for the students. The topics derive from our desire to design a UAVs simulation and testing platform, by means of which we can verify the implementation of various autonomous planning and coordination strategies and techniques for flight missions with one or more unmanned aerial vehicles. The missions are diverse and usually they are modeled to fit as well as possible to the actual demands of the market: mapping missions, monitoring, search and rescue, mobile ground target tracking. Furthermore, we have set as objective the autonomous behavior of each UAV. Thus, within a mission, each aircraft had the capacity to intelligently make decisions and to respond to unpredictable events without human intervention. The results of the research within this partnership are being materialized as bachelor’s degree papers, master’s dissertation papers and research reports of the involved students.

Several software and hardware technologies which are specific to the field are being used to cover the suggested topics:

• Software Flight Simulators; FlightGear Flight Simulator, JSBSim, YASim, etc;
• Embedded computing solutions: Raspberry Pi, BeagleBone Black, etc;
• Distributed systems of solutions: OpenNebula, etc.