With autonomous aerial vehicles enacting safety-critical missions, such as the Mars Science Laboratory Curiosity rover’s entry, descent, and landing on Mars, awareness and reasoning regarding potentially hazardous landing sites is paramount. This paper presents a coupled perception-planning solution which address the real-time hazard detection, optimal landing trajectory generation, and contingency planning challenges encountered when landing in uncertain environments. The perception and planning components are addressed by the proposed Hazard-Aware Landing Site Selection (HALSS) framework and Adaptive Deferred-Decision Trajectory Optimization (Adaptive-DDTO) algorithm respectively. The HALSS framework processes point clouds through a segmentation network to predict a binary safety map which is analyzed using the medial axis transform to efficiently identify circular, safe landing zones. The Adaptive-DDTO algorithm address the need for contingency planning during target failure scenarios through adaptively recomputed multi-target trajectory optimization. Overall, Adaptive-DDTO achieves 18.16% increase in terms of landing success rate and 0.4% decrease in cumulative control effort compared to its predecessor, DDTO, while computing near real-time solutions, when coupled with HALSS, in a simulated environment.
@inproceedings{HaynerBucknerEtAl2023,author={Hayner, C. R. and Buckner, S. C. and Broyles, D. and Madewell, E. and Leung, K. and A\c{c}{\i}kme\c{s}e, B.},booktitle={{Proc.\ IEEE Conf.\ on Robotics and Automation}},title={{HALO}: Hazard-Aware Landing Optimization for Autonomous Systems},year={2023},arxiv={2304.01583},category={afsl},img={HaynerBucknerEtAl2023.png},owner={karenl7}}
Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle for Search and Locate Operations
Madewell, E.,
Pollack, E.,
Kuni, H.,
Johri, S.,
Broyles, D.,
Vagners, J.,
and Leung, K.
The deployment of Uncrewed Aerial Vehicles (UAV) in wilderness search and locate operations has gained attention in the past few years. To help expand the effective search radius and provide more flexible UAV search capabilities, we propose a Reliable Uninterrupted Communications Kit for UAV Search (RUCKUS), a backpackable Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight UAV system utilizing an intermediate "relay UAV" to provide an uninterrupted communications link between the ground station and the search UAV. The proposed system is designed to be self-contained, modular, and affordable and can provide continuous sensor data and control flow between the search UAV and ground station, enabling the users to receive real-time video feedback from the search UAV and dynamically update the UAV’s search strategy. In this paper, we describe the proposed system architecture and characterization of the signal strength via a number of experimental flight tests. The end goal is to develop a flexible, cost-effective, and portable BVLOS solution to aid first responders and alike in safety-critical operations where extending the operational range can significantly improve mission success.
@inproceedings{MadewellPollackEtAl2024,author={Madewell, E. and Pollack, E. and Kuni, H. and Johri, S. and Broyles, D. and Vagners, J. and Leung, K.},booktitle={{AIAA Scitech Forum}},title={Beyond Visual Line-of-Sight Uncrewed Aerial Vehicle for Search and Locate Operations},year={2024},category={afsl},img={MadewellPollackEtAl2024.png},owner={karenl7}}
