SBIR Phase I: Drones for Industrial Indoor Robotic Applications

该项目更广泛的影响/商业潜力将是在工业和商业室内环境中部署无人机作为空中机器人的能力。在有人在场的室内环境中部署无人机的一个关键要求是使其安全且无威胁。此外，要让无人机像机器人一样工作，它们需要完全自主，最大限度地减少对人类操作或干预的需求。这些特性是目前传统无人机技术无法实现的。使用无人机作为空中机器人的能力可以在仓库库存扫描、建筑、安全和工厂自动化等大型市场中开辟机会。这样的机器人可以实现扫描和重建环境等功能，或者也可以？挑选和放置？在工厂内的高吞吐量。在工业室内环境中使用无人机进行这些应用也可以带来更广泛的社会效益，包括提高工业室内环境内工人的安全性（通过执行可能需要线束，叉车或梯子的任务）；减少对环境的影响（在建筑工地，通过及早发现差异，最大限度地减少返工和材料浪费）和宏观经济效益（实现未来的自动化工厂，并为美国带来就业机会）。这个小型企业创新研究（SBIR）第一阶段项目有潜力推进无人机和其他应用中使用的设计和控制系统的知识前沿。这种独特的方法重新定义了旋翼飞机的控制系统，并使无人机的指标得到了显着改善。高达10倍——这是传统上用来描述无人机性能的指标。在这个一期项目中，Vimaan计划完成系统的设计和建模，开发系统的控制机制，并对具有上述属性的无人机进行集成、测试和演示。在项目期间，Vimaan将需要克服组件和系统设计、控制电路和控制算法以及功率预算、时序和优化子系统所需性能方面的一些关键技术挑战。如果成功，这种创新将彻底改变迄今为止在旋翼飞机上使用的数十年的传统技术，并使航空航天工业长期追求的特性成为可能。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The broader impact / commercial potential of this project would be in the ability to deploy drones in industrial and commercial indoor environments as aerial robots. A key requirement to deploying drones in such indoor environments in the presence of people is to make them safe and non-threatening. In addition, for drones to function as robots, they need to be made fully autonomous and minimize the need for human operation or intervention. These attributes are not possible with conventional drone technology today. The ability to use drones as aerial robots can open up opportunities in large markets such as warehouse inventory scanning, construction, security, and factory automation. Such robots can enable functions such as scanning and reconstruction of the environment, or also ?pick and place? at high throughput within factories. The use of drones in industrial indoor environments for these applications can also result in broader societal benefits, including improved worker safety inside industrial indoor environments (by performing tasks that may otherwise require harnesses, forklifts or ladders); reduced environmental impacts (in construction sites by catching discrepancies early and minimizing rework and material wastage) and macroeconomic benefits (enabling automated factories of the future and bringing back US jobs). This Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase I Project has the potential to advance the frontiers of knowledge in design and control systems for use in drones and other applications. This unique approach redefines the control systems for rotorcraft, and enables a drone with dramatically improved metrics ? as much as 10X -- that are traditionally used to characterize the performance of drones. In this Phase I project, Vimaan plans to complete the design and modeling of the system, develop the control mechanisms for the system, and integrate, test and demonstrate the application of the innovation to a drone that has the above attributes. During the project, Vimaan will need to overcome some critical technical challenges in the components and systems design, the control circuitry and controls algorithms and the power budgets, timings and optimizations of the sub-systems for the required performance. If successful, such an innovation would revolutionize decades old legacy technologies that have been hitherto deployed in rotorcraft, and make possible attributes that have been long sought after by the aerospace industry.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.