Towards the Development of an Automatic UAV-Based Indoor Environmental Monitoring System: Distributed Off-Board Control System for a Micro Aerial Vehicle

• Main Authors: Jorge Solis, Christoffer Karlsson, Simon Johansson, Kristoffer Richardsson
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-03-01
• Series: Applied Sciences
• Subjects: micro aerial vehicles; visual-based control; Kalman filter
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/11/5/2347

This research aims to develop an automatic unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based indoor environmental monitoring system for the acquisition of data at a very fine scale to detect rapid changes in environmental features of plants growing in greenhouses. Due to the complexity of the proposed research, in this paper we proposed an off-board distributed control system based on visual input for a micro aerial vehicle (MAV) able to hover, navigate, and fly to a desired target location without considerably affecting the effective flight time. Based on the experimental results, the MAV was able to land on the desired location within a radius of about 10 cm from the center point of the landing pad, with a reduction in the effective flight time of about 28%.