Despite various high profile incidents of drones being flown in populated areas, to date their main application has been in examining very sparsely populated territories, with utility inspections and crop maintenance particularly common use cases.
A team from Cranfield University have developed a smartphone app that they believe can easily connect with commercially available drones to allow them to autonomously inspect a range of locations, simply via coordinates sent via SMS.
The work is part of the CASCADE project, which aims to accelerate the development of unmanned aerial vehicles across a range of applications by automatic the control of the vehicle.
“Autonomy is a fundamental factor in increasing the ease of adoption of UAVs for many applications while reducing operational costs. Creating this smartphone app has demonstrated that UAVs can carry out complex tasks autonomously from simple instructions,” the researchers explain. “We are initially focusing on demonstrating the benefits that multiple autonomous UAV operations can have within a precision agriculture environment, but alternative use cases are being considered to enable quick spin-off adoption into other applications such as search and rescue.”
Smart navigation
The app has been developed for Andoid devices and should work with the majority of drones on the market today. It receives waypoints via SMS and from that can compile a mission and send the drone off on them autonomously. It includes a number of safety features to ensure the drone operates legally, with a safety pilot kept on standby in the current iteration.
The waypoints are currently defined by a higher level survey drone that works alongside the system to process data during flight before communicating it with a ground control station. Text messages are then sent to this ground station by the mobile phone that is connected to each drone with the right coordinates to fly to.
The app, which has already been tested at Snowdonia Airfield is under constant development, with future improvements aiming to reduce the need for on-site manpower so that the device has higher levels of automation. The team also hope to enable the control of multiple drones autonomously, especially at extended and beyond visual line of sight.
