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Design and Development of Micro Aerial Vehicles and their Cooperative Systems for Target Search and Tracking
Lin Chi Mak1, Makoto Kumon2, Mark Whitty1, Jayantha Katupitiya1 and Tomonari Furukawa3 1ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering The University of New South Wales NSW 2052 Australia 2Graduate School of Science and Technology Kumamoto University Kumamoto 860-8555 Japan 3Department of Mechanical Engineering Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University IALR, Danville, VA 24541 USA Received on 18th March 2009; Accepted on 17th April 2009 ABSTRACT This paper presents Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) and their cooperative systems including Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) and a Base Station (BS), which were primarily designed for the 1st US-Asian Demonstration and Assessment on Micro-Aerial and Unmanned Ground Vehicle Technology (MAV08). The MAVs are of coaxial design, which imparts mechanical stability both outdoor and indoor while obeying a 30 cm size constraint. They have carbon fibre frames for weight reduction allowing microcontrollers and various sensors to be mounted on-board for tele-operated and waypoint control. The UGVs are similarly equipped to perform their own search and tracking mission but also to support the MAVs by relaying data between the MAVs and the BS when they are out of direct range. The BS monitors the vehicles and their environment and navigates them autonomously or with humans in the loop through the developed GUI. The ability of the MAV in flight was demonstrated by showing continuous hovering. The efficacy of the overall system was validated by autonomously controlling two UGVs for cooperative search.

1. INTRODUCTION Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) have been receiving considerable attention in the last decade due to their maneuverability with small static constraints [1,2]. Consider an urban search-and-rescue scenario where victims are trapped in a collapsed building. Human rescuers and large vehicles are not the first choice for reconnaissance because of their size limitations that introduce severe static constraints. Rescuers and ground vehicles have additional static constraints from the geometry of terrain. If designed to fly with small dynamic constraints allowing various flight patterns including hovering, MAVs can provide a robotic solution for real world problems. Furthermore, if MAVs can cooperatively work on a mission together with heterogeneous systems such as ground vehicles, the solution would be substantially effective for real world problems. The MAV08 for which the systems presented in this paper were developed was an event that gave opportunities to challenge such a scenario. In the event, MAVs less than 30 cm in any dimension and their cooperative systems were principally expected to find a victim in a building from a position 1km away, requiring technological innovation in the development of MAVs and their cooperative systems.

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