Development of Autonomous Aero-Robot and Its Application to Safety and Disaster Prevention

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The objective of this research is to develop a complete autonomous aero-robot, which can support various activities in an occasion of disaster such as large earthquakes, fires, and volcanic eruption.In the first year, not only the basic design and development of the hardware of the aero-robot but also development of the flight simulator were carried out. GPS-INS hybrid navigation system, which is necessary for advanced flight control systems, was developed and the error of the position is reduced to only 2 cm. Moreover methods to design robust control system against various kinds of uncertainties by use of neural networks were proposed. For a control interface, voice command system was developed and evaluated. Then the difference between novice operators and skilled operators became clear as a result of analysis of the flight data.In the second year, the hardware of aero-robot was improved for advanced flight control systems, and we made success in autonomous flight by use of controllers by use of neural networks or adaptive controller, and it is shown that controllers designed by the proposed methods are much superior to the conventional flight controllers. Moreover, the voice command system was also improved so that it can be used in noisy environment with enough stability, then the command system became much more useful in practical applications.In the third year, systems, which were useful in information gathering at disaster site, were developed. Because web based datagram delivery is adopted, the developed system to gather and deliver aerial video and photograph is much easier to use and much cheaper than before and flight experiments showed its effectiveness. Moreover a method to make 3D terrain map by use of a stereo camera and GPS-INS hybrid navigation system together is developed and it is shown that the 3D map is very accurate and has enough resolution for investigation at disaster site and so on.