Team 3: Eagle Eye

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  Title Slide

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  Advisors and mentees

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  Project Overview and Motivation

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  Specifications and Constraints

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  Design Alternatives (1/2)

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  Design Alternatives (2/2)

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  Project Components (1/3)

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  Project Components (2/3)

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  Project Components (3/3)

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  Project Management (1/2)

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  Project Management (2/2)

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  Engineering and Design Standards (1/3)

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  Engineering and Design Standards (2/3)

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  Engineering and Design Standards (3/3)

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  Bill of Materials

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  Ethical Considerations in Autonomous UAV Operations

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  Thank You!

Abstract

Autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (aUAVs) present enormous societal and economic benefits with their potential to carry out missions such as the delivery of medical supplies and food, search-and-rescue operations, agricultural functions, and industrial surveillance. One critical safety issue that must be addressed prior to large-scale aUAV implementation is the potential for trajectory conflicts within this complex low-altitude, high-density airspace. Current decentralized methods for trajectory conflict resolution are energy and resource intensive, rendering it difficult to scale and implement. We propose a centralized, infrastructure-to-vehicle (I2V) approach that leverages modular embedded systems acting as air traffic controllers for a specific sector of the airspace utilized by aUAVs. Our framework projects a voxel-based airspace reservation system, maintained by a centralized ground station. The ground station interrogates and retrieves the stored trajectories from aUAVs approaching the reservation airspace. Trajectory conflict search is performed by the ground station, and conflict resolution protocols are transmitted back to the aUAVs. Our communication protocol is XBee-based and can be integrated with a large range of aUAV flight controllers via a lightweight on-board ODROID microcontroller. Due to the current safety shortfalls of aUAV operations, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) enforces severe restrictions on aUAVs within the National Airspace (NAS). Our centralized and scalable traffic control system for aUAVs provide an actionable solution to the status quo, potentially serving as a technological framework for future legislation aimed at lifting current restrictions on aUAV operations.

Keywords: autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles; centralized air traffic control; embedded systems; infrastructure-to-vehicle; voxel-based reservation system