Towards an Autonomous Vision-Based Unmanned Aerial System against Wildlife Poachers

in Sensors (2015), 15(12), 29861

Poaching is an illegal activity that remains out of control in many countries. Based on the 2014 report of the United Nations and Interpol, the illegal trade of global wildlife and natural resources ... [more ▼]

Poaching is an illegal activity that remains out of control in many countries. Based on the 2014 report of the United Nations and Interpol, the illegal trade of global wildlife and natural resources amounts to nearly $213 billion every year, which is even helping to fund armed conflicts. Poaching activities around the world are further pushing many animal species on the brink of extinction. Unfortunately, the traditional methods to fight against poachers are not enough, hence the new demands for more efficient approaches. In this context, the use of new technologies on sensors and algorithms, as well as aerial platforms is crucial to face the high increase of poaching activities in the last few years. Our work is focused on the use of vision sensors on UAVs for the detection and tracking of animals and poachers, as well as the use of such sensors to control quadrotors during autonomous vehicle following and autonomous landing. [less ▲]

Adaptive Control of Aerial Manipulation Vehicle

in Porceedings of the 4th IEEE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON CONTROL SYSTEM, COMPUTING AND ENGINEERING (2014, November)

Adaptive Control of an Aerial Manipulation Vehicle is discussed here. The aerial manipulation vehicle consisting of a quadrotor and a robotic arm has a highly coupled dynamics. The nonlinear coupling ... [more ▼]

Adaptive Control of an Aerial Manipulation Vehicle is discussed here. The aerial manipulation vehicle consisting of a quadrotor and a robotic arm has a highly coupled dynamics. The nonlinear coupling introduces additional forces and moments on the quadrotor which prevents it from precisely hovering at a position and tracking of reference trajectory. A decentralized control of robotic arm and quadrotor is considered. The robotic arm is controlled by a PID approach with acceleration feedback, and the quadrotor is controlled by PD method in the inner loop and adaptive position control in the outer loop. The proposed method successfully handles the problem of hover stabilization and trajectory tracking. [less ▲]

Using the Cross-Entropy method for control optimization: A case study of see-and-avoid on unmanned aerial vehicles

in Control and Automation (MED), 2014 22nd Mediterranean Conference of (2014, June)

This paper presents an adaptation of the Cross-Entropy (CE) method to optimize fuzzy logic controllers. The CE is a recently developed optimization method based on a general Monte-Carlo approach to ... [more ▼]

This paper presents an adaptation of the Cross-Entropy (CE) method to optimize fuzzy logic controllers. The CE is a recently developed optimization method based on a general Monte-Carlo approach to combinatorial and continuous multi-extremal optimization and importance sampling. This work shows the application of this optimization method to optimize the inputs gains, the location and size of the different membership functions' sets of each variable, as well as the weight of each rule from the rule's base of a fuzzy logic controller (FLC). The control system approach presented in this work was designed to command the orientation of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to modify its trajectory for avoiding collisions. An onboard looking forward camera was used to sense the environment of the UAV. The information extracted by the image processing algorithm is the only input of the fuzzy control approach to avoid the collision with a predefined object. Real tests with a quadrotor have been done to corroborate the improved behavior of the optimized controllers at different stages of the optimization process. [less ▲]

Modeling and Control of Aerial Manipulation Vehicle with Visual sensor

in Second Workshop on Research, Development and Education on Unmanned Aerial Systems (RED-UAS 2013) (2013, November)

Modeling and control of a Quadrotor with robotic arm which uses vision sensor is discussed. A quadrotor model coupled with a two link manipulator is first developed and then the integrated control ... [more ▼]

Modeling and control of a Quadrotor with robotic arm which uses vision sensor is discussed. A quadrotor model coupled with a two link manipulator is first developed and then the integrated control mechanism is investigated. An Image Based Visual Servo system is introduced and then used with the aerial manipulator to successfully perform specific tasks of positioning and stabilization during manipulation. [less ▲]