Distributed Autonomous Pilot Control for Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)

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Autonomous vehicles such as Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) are gaining increasing acceptance in variousapplications. The UAV industry will see explosive growth in terms of both quantities and the areas ofapplications while the autonomous or semi-autonomous vehicles will be in the market in foreseeable future. Itis observed that the trend of autopilot control is going towards intelligent as autonomous or semi-autonomousoperations of UAVs become more and more popular and necessary. Therefore, how to develop distributedsensors or sensor network based intelligent autopilot controllers is of vital interest and also technology-wiseinnovative for the UAV industry. In this regard, a network of field sensors such as cameras, sonic sensor,RADAR, LiDAR, etc., has to be applied with information fused together to provide the perception of thesurrounding environment. The autopilot controller could then make decision based on the fused information tomaneuver the autonomous operation of UAVs.In this project, it is intended to 1. develop distributed 3-D reconstruction algorithms for sensing and perceptionperformed by cameras and LiDARs; 2. develop sensing data fusion mechanism in a networked environment tobe integrated with the flight autopilot control; and 3. implement the controller with advanced hardwaretechnology such as multi-processors with graphic processing unit (GPU) or FPGA solution upon cost andefficiency assessment. In particular, the distributed algorithms will be developed for field sensor nodes and thedata fusion mechanism will be explored and developed for a networked and complimentary configuration offield sensors in order to assemble the information collected by each individual sensor in an automated way.Based on this distributed structure and the data fusion mechanism, the intelligent autopilot controller will bebuilt up for autonomous operation of UAVs. It is expected that the project deliverable be applied to optimizeintelligent autopilot design for various autonomous missions.