Automated ground maintenance and health management for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles

Automated ground maintenance is a necessity for multi-UAV systems. Without such automation, these systems will become more of a burden than a benefit as human operators struggle to contend with maintenance operations for large numbers of vehicles. By creating autonomous UAV systems that can take care of themselves, human operators will be free to concentrate on higher level tasks such as using the information gathered by the system to direct future mission activities. This thesis describes the design, testing, construction, and usage of the first fully autonomous recharge system for small, battery-powered UAVs. This system was used to perform the first fully-autonomous quadrotor UAV long-term flight tests and to conduct multi-UAV mission management research. In addition, this thesis describes, to the best of our knowledge, the first landing and recharge of a UAV on a mobile recharge platform.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2007

Author dc:creator

• Dale, Daniel R., M. Eng. Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Jonathan P. How.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/41541

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/41541