Abstract
Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) flight control and sensor data acquisition are typically decoupled in intelligence-related missions. In the archetypal case, a UAV flies pre-programmed GPS waypoints while an on-board sensor streams data to a ground control station observed by a human or post-processed for analysis. In this paper, we present work on a simple UAV system that incorporates sensor data to statistically minimize the time to autonomously locate an RF emitter on the ground. The demonstrated system uses a two-stage approach to finding the RF target: (1) randomized Lévy flight to search the ground space and, (2) simplex minimization to home in on the target. Flight tests showed that the UAV consistently located the target within 10 m accuracy in a large outdoor field. Algorithm pseudocode, heat map plots, and supplementary videos of the UAV successfully executing its search task are presented.
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Acknowledgments
The authors thank Michael Klinker and Will Bartlett for field testing support; Daniel Jih for early simplex development; Paul Huckfeldt for graphics; Jon Barron for photography; Michael Boulet, Andy Vidan and Bernadette Johnson for program support and funding; and Spring Berman for an insightful discussion. This work is sponsored by the Department of the Air Force under Air Force Contract #FA8721-05-C-0002. Opinions, interpretations, conclusions and recommendations are those of the authors and are not necessarily endorsed by the United States Government.
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© 2014 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Park, M.J., Coldwell, C. (2014). Sensor Integrated Navigation for a Target Finding UAV. In: Natraj, A., Cameron, S., Melhuish, C., Witkowski, M. (eds) Towards Autonomous Robotic Systems. TAROS 2013. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8069. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43645-5_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-43645-5_10
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