Autonomous Sensor Deployment using an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle

Abstract

This thesis presents the development of an autonomous geophone-sensor deployment system using quadrotors. The objective is to present control structures for the deployment and retrieval of the geophone sensor capsule at a desired location. A model is developed for the quadrotors-manipulator system taking into account aerodynamic drag, ground effect, center of mass effect and wind disturbance. Thereafter, the backstepping control, active disturbance rejection control and trajectory optimization control techniques are proposed to solve the autonomous control task. Finally, a hybrid system comprising vision-assist subsystem and some finite state automata is proposed for the precision landing and task completion for the quadrotor system. Results were verified using Matlab and VREP.