Using a Drone Formation with Sectored Antennas in Search-And-Rescue: Heuristics for Orienting Drones and Moving the Formation

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Conference Contributions - Published
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Date
2022
Authors
Pell S
Willig, Andreas
Abstract

Recently there has been interest in using drones/unmanned aerial vehicles in search-and-rescue applications. Here we apply a formation of drones equipped with sectorised antennae to navigate to a transmitter using Direction of Arrival (DoA) estimation to navigate. We present results indicating that the error of the DoA estimate is dependent on the DoA and evaluate a mitigation technique, finding that incrementally changing the drone orientation across the formation reduces the DoA estimation error. Further, we investigate a “dumbbell” formation in which the two “weights” generate independent DoA estimates, the difference between which are used to broadly classify the distance to the transmitter. We found that the choice of distance thresholds and relative direction of the transmitter substantially changes the performance of this distance heuristic.

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Citation
Pell S, Willig A (2022). Using a Drone Formation with Sectored Antennas in Search-And-Rescue: Heuristics for Orienting Drones and Moving the Formation. Virtual conference: IEEE 33rd Annual International Symposium on Personal, Indoor and Vehicular Networking Conference (PIMRC). 12/09/2022-15/09/2022.
Keywords
direction-of-arrival estimation, search and rescue, UAV, UAV formations
Ngā upoko tukutuku/Māori subject headings
ANZSRC fields of research
Fields of Research::40 - Engineering::4002 - Automotive engineering::400203 - Automotive mechatronics and autonomous systems
Fields of Research::40 - Engineering::4013 - Geomatic engineering::401303 - Navigation and position fixing
Fields of Research::46 - Information and computing sciences::4601 - Applied computing::460106 - Spatial data and applications
Fields of Research::46 - Information and computing sciences::4606 - Distributed computing and systems software::460609 - Networking and communications
Fields of Research::40 - Engineering::4007 - Control engineering, mechatronics and robotics::400703 - Autonomous vehicle systems
Fields of Research::40 - Engineering::4007 - Control engineering, mechatronics and robotics::400703 - Autonomous vehicle systems
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All rights reserved unless otherwise stated