Autonomous quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle for culvert inspection
Author(s)
Serrano, Nathan E
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Other Contributors
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.
Advisor
Seth Teller, Nicholas Roy and Jonathan Williams.
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This document presents work done to lay the foundation for an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system for inspecting culverts. By expanding upon prior progress creating an autonomous indoor quadrotor, many basic hardware and software issues are solved. The main new functionality needed for the culvert inspection task was to utilize the Global Positioning System (GPS) available outdoors to make up for the relative scarcity of objects visible to the Light Detection And Ranging sensor (LIDAR). The GPS data is fused in a new state estimator, which also incorporates data from the scan matcher running on the LIDAR data, as well as the data from the quadrotor's Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU). This data is combined into a single estimate of the current state (position, orientation, velocity, angular velocity, and acceleration) of the quadrotor by an Extended Kalman Filter (EKF). This new state estimate enables autonomous outdoor navigation and operation of this micro-UAV.
Description
Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011. Cataloged from PDF version of thesis. Includes bibliographical references (p. 69).
Date issued
2011Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer SciencePublisher
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Keywords
Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.