Dronehall Infrastructure for New Agile Flight Control Light Autonomous Robot in Indoor Area
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The Dronehall is a unique infrastructure in Europe that attracts various opportunities for drone research and development in Carinthia. The project DINA-FLAI aims to extend the Dronehall’s infrastructure to enable more sophisticated R&D in mobile multi-robot systems for future applications. The extension targets specifically the challenges of robust autonomous navigation of mobile platforms, which is essential for supporting farming, environmental monitoring, and pollution monitoring processes for a greener Europe. The project envisions important elements to support next generation robust autonomy
GNSS independent navigation allows operations of drones in confined and indoor spaces where GNSS is obstructed. The project supports research on vision based state estimation, which enabls drone applications that required high-precision navigation. The project adds a high-performance projector to the Dronehall to enable a precisely known visual structure on the environment, which provids ground truth image values for pixel-intensity based camera navigation methods. The projector also allows for precise outlier generation and live visualization of the system’s status.
DINA-FLAI also supports the decoupling of localization and control processes, which allows for better pin-point and analyze issues in one or the other without the requirement of always running both at the same time for closed loop flight tests. The project installs a cable robot in the Dronehall, which achievs the decoupling of control and localization. The cable robot is suspended by four cords in the upper corner of the Dronehall, allowing maximum volume coverage. The cable robot enables continuous operation, high data throughput, more payload, and simple emergency-stop functionality.
With these expansions, the Dronehall gains on capability, attracts local and international research and industry, gains on international visibility, and contributes to the transition of research results to industry.
