Control of an indoor autonomous mobile communications relay via antenna diversity

Presented in this thesis is a motion planning scheme for enabling a quadrotor unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) to serve as an autonomous communications relay in indoor or GPS-denied environments. The goal of the algorithm is to maximize the throughput of the end-to-end communications channel. An extremum-seeking controller steers the quadrotor while collision avoidance is provided by artificial potential fields. Extremum-seeking is model-free adaptive control method; it's applicable in situations where there is a nonlinearity in the control problem and the nonlinearity has a local minimum or maximum. The extremum-seeking controller presented here is driven by antenna diversity and attempts to optimize the inputs to an unknown, time-varying cost function characterized by the RF environment. Each of the multiple antennas onboard the quadrotor receives the same incoming packets and provides associated signal strength measurements. The extremum-seeking controller then uses these measurements to autonomously fly the quadrotor communications relay to an optimal location so as to maximize throughput, all without positioning data. This work is motivated by the need to extend the operating ranges of robots in complex urban and indoor environments. The algorithm and necessary technical background are presented in detail. Simulations results verify the validity of the proposed extremum-seeking approach. Experiments demonstrate the feasability of implementing the extremum-seeking controller with tangible hardware.

Name thesis:degree_name

Electrical Engineering

Level thesis:degree_level

Thesis

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Electrical and Computer Engineering

Year

2011

Author dc:creator

• Griffin, Brian

Contributors dc:contributor

• Fierro, Rafael
• Abdallah, Chaouki
• Jayaweera, Sudharman

• Autonomous robots Ç‚x Control systems
• Quadrotor helicopters--Automatic control
• Radio Ç‚x Receivers and reception Ç‚x Diversity systems
• Mobile communication systems.

Language dc:language

English

Repository record dc:identifier

https://digitalrepository.unm.edu/ece_etds/104

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:digitalrepository.unm.edu:ece_etds-1103