Personal tools

Energy Efficient Autonomous UAVs

From iis-projects

Revision as of 19:51, 18 February 2018 by Dpalossi (talk | contribs)
Jump to: navigation, search
A-B) The PULP-Shield PCB developed at IIS by our student Hanna Müller. C) Our nano-drone prototype based on the CrazyFlie 2.0 coupled with the PULP-Shield.

Topic

Nano-size Quadrotor

The CrazyFlie 2.0 extended with camera and on-board computation for autonomous navigation. Developed at IIS by our former student Jaskirat Singh.

Our first cyberphysical platform is the nano-size Bitcraze CrazyFlie 2.0 [1]. It has been used in many projects due to its dimension, versatility and its open-source and open-hardware nature. Nowadays is well known how UAVs with high level autonomous navigation capabilities are a hot topic both in industry and academia due to their numerous applications. However, autonomous navigation algorithms are demanding from the computational standpoint, and it is very challenging to run them on-board of nano-scale UAVs (i.e., few centimeters of diameter) because of the limited capabilities of their MCU-based controllers. The nano-quadrotor is an appealing platform (among others) for solving this challenging task. Moreover, recent evolution of our research effort PULP


Nano-size Blimp

One of our favorite nano-size platform is the IIS/TIK Nano-Blimp. A nano-sized blimp is a perfect candidate for long flight times because helium, a lighter-than-air gas, can provide lift and significantly reduce the energy requirements for flight.

A) The self-sustainable nano-blimp developed at IIS/TIK by our student Kevin Keller. B) The blimp model with solar panel, MCU’s, battery, and rotor.
A) The autonomous nano-blimp developed at IIS/TIK by our student Bence Szebedy. B) The blimp model with on-board camera, MCU’s, battery, and rotors for 3D movements.














In the first project of this series we introduced the nano-blimp. We demonstrated that, thanks to the helium-filled balloon, the energy requirement for hovering is significantly reduced. Then, we extended the functionality of our first self-sustainable blimp prototype introducing additional motors and on-board camera, paving the way for autonomous navigation. We enabled first horizontal movement creating a blimp that is able to move in three dimensions. Then, we expanded the on-board processing capabilities with visual sensors and we incorporated, optimized, and improved a simple object tracking algorithm for autonomous flying nano-size UAVs.


The PULP-Shield

The PULP-Shield PCB developed at IIS by our student Hanna Müller.

Here at IIS we developed the PULP-Shield, the first pluggable PCB for extending the computational power on-board of the CrazyFlie 2.0 nano-size platform. Through this project we enabled the Parallel Ultra Low-Power Platform [2] to be the key computational unit to bring state-of-the-art complex vision algorithms for autonomous navigation into the nano-scale class of vehicles. Thus, we enabled for the first time the Parallel Computational Paradigm on-board of this tiny class of vehicles. Even if the PULP architecture is meant to act as the main agent of the system, we aim to keep the pre-existing MCU (STM32) present on the UAV as the "coordinator" (i.e., host) of the system. Then, PULP can play the role of the accelerator in charge of performing the compute-intensive kernels. Thus, embodying the classic paradigm Host + Accelerator, the goal is exploiting on one side the existing firmware running on the STM32 MCU, and on the other adding the high computational capability of the 8-cores chip in an ultra-low-power envelope. Future directions for this project series are both in the implementation of state-of-the-art algorithms on-board of our nano-size platforms and on the design of a new cyberphysical system only based on the PULP architecture.


Contact Information

Daniele Palossi
Daniele Palossi



Collaborations

We are pleased to inform our students that we have the opportunity to offer co-supervised Master/Semester Thesis on the Autonomous UAVs topic in collaborations with other top-quality research groups like:

  • TIK: The Computer Engineering and Networks Laboratory - ETH Zürich - Web Site
  • RPG: Robotic and Perception Group - University of Zürich - Web Site
  • MICREL: Microelectronics Laboratory - University of Bologna - Web Site


Projects

We are listing a few projects below to give you an idea of what we do. However, we constantly have new project ideas and maybe some other approaches become obsolete in the very rapidly advancing research area. Please just contact us and come to talk with us.

Available Projects


Completed Projects


Publications

The group effort and the great contribution from the students of last few years has resulted in the following list of publications:

  • 2018 - D. Palossi et Al., "Extending the Lifetime of Nano-Blimps via Dynamic Motor Control", Springer Journal of Signal Processing Systems (Springer JSPS) - Accepted
  • 2017 - D. Palossi et Al., "Target Following on Nano-Scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles", 7th IEEE International Workshop on Advances in Sensors and Interfaces, June 15-16, Vieste, Italy, 2017 - On-line
  • 2017 - B. Forsberg et Al., "GPU-Accelerated Real-Time Path Planning and the Predictable Execution Model", International Conference on Computational Science (ICCS), June 12-14, Zürich, Switzerland, 2017 - On-line
  • 2017 - D. Palossi et Al., "On the Accuracy of Near-Optimal CPU-Based Path Planning for UAVs", 20th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems (SCOPES), June 12-13, Sankt Goar, Germany, 2017 - On-line
  • 2017 - D. Palossi et Al., "Self-sustainability in Nano Unmanned Aerial Vehicles: A Blimp Case Study", Computing Frontiers (CF), May 15-17, Siena, Italy, 2017 - On-line
  • 2017 - D. Palossi et Al., "Ultra Low-Power Visual Odometry for Nano-Scale Unmanned Aerial Vehicles", Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), March 27-31, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2017 - On-line
  • 2016 - D. Palossi et Al., "Exploring Single Source Shortest Path Parallelization on Shared Memory Accelerator", 19th International Workshop on Software and Compilers for Embedded Systems (SCOPES), May 23-25, Sankt Goar, Germany, 2016 - On-line
  • 2016 - D. Palossi et Al., "An Energy-Efficient Parallel Algorithm for Real-Time Near-Optimal UAV Path Planning", 2nd Workshop on Design of Low Power Embedded Systems (LP-EMS), May 16-18, Como, Italy, 2016 - On-line
  • 2016 - F. Conti et Al., "Enabling the Heterogeneous Accelerator Model on Ultra-Low Power Microcontroller Platforms", Design, Automation and Test in Europe (DATE), March 14-18, Dresden, Germany, 2016 - On-line

External Links