Designing a sensor management system for UAVs

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The field of unmanned robotic systems is rapidly growing and a multitude of applications are being enabledand/or are benefiting from such systems. For example, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), unmanned groundvehicles (UGVs), and marine and hybrid autonomous robots are being used in civilian, surveillance, logistics,environmental monitoring, patrolling, and rescue missions. Many of such missions require a long operationtime and therefore it is mission critical that the robot, UAV, and UGV has enough power to reliably operateduring the mission. Many such robotic systems include various sensors to sense their surrounding. Therefore,reliable data communication between the robot and the control centre, particularly in environmentalmonitoring, surveillance and rescue missions is of paramount importance. In this context, RIC Electronics, Ltd.(RIC), is interested in developing a mobile robot which carries multiple sensors and will be used to gathersensory data in hazardous environments such as pipelines, high-voltage plants, and toxic environments. Thisdevice requires power as well as sensory data to be transferred reliably and simultaneously to and from therobot to the control centre over a distance of up to 100 meters. Given the relatively long duration of operation,using batteries is not a viable option as the required battery would be excessively large and heavy for the robotto carry, in particular, when the robot is a UAV. Also, given the metallic enclosures and obstacles in suchenvironment wireless data communication to and from the robot is not a reliable option. Therefore, the goal ofthis project is to use a coaxial cable to simultaneously transfer power and data to and from the robot in areliable manner.In this project, we plan to design a robust on-board sensor management system to read sensors and transfer themeasurements over a long coaxial cable (up to 100 meters and beyond). In the coaxial cable, the datatransmission line is coupled to the power line. This can potentially affect the reliability of the transmitted data.