A Study on Hovering Control of Small Aerial Robot by Sensing Existing Floor Features

Chinthaka Premachandra; Dang Ngoc Hoang Thanh; Tomotaka Kimura; Hiroharu Kawanaka

doi:10.1109/JAS.2020.1003240

Volume 7 Issue 4

Jun. 2020

IEEE/CAA Journal of Automatica Sinica

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Chinthaka Premachandra, Dang Ngoc Hoang Thanh, Tomotaka Kimura and Hiroharu Kawanaka, "A Study on Hovering Control of Small Aerial Robot by Sensing Existing Floor Features," IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 1016-1025, July 2020. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003240

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Chinthaka Premachandra, Dang Ngoc Hoang Thanh, Tomotaka Kimura and Hiroharu Kawanaka, "A Study on Hovering Control of Small Aerial Robot by Sensing Existing Floor Features," IEEE/CAA J. Autom. Sinica, vol. 7, no. 4, pp. 1016-1025, July 2020. doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003240

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A Study on Hovering Control of Small Aerial Robot by Sensing Existing Floor Features

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003240

Funds: This work was partially supported by Branding Research Fund by Shibaura Institute of Technology (SIT)

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Author Bio:
Chinthaka Premachandra (M’11) received the B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees from Mie University, Japan, in 2006 and 2008, respectively, and the Ph.D degree from the Nagoya University, Japan, in 2011. From 2012 to 2015, Dr. Chinthaka Premachandra was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tokyo University of Science, Japan. From 2016 to 2017, he was an Assistant in the Department of Electronic Engineering, School of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Japan. In 2018, he was promoted to Associate Professor in the Department of Electronic Engineering, Graduate School of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology. In addition, he is the Manager of Image Processing and Robotic Lab at the same department. His lab conducts research in two main fields: image processing and robotics. Former research includes computer vision, pattern recognition, speed up image processing, and camera based intelligent transportation systems, while latter fields include terrestrial robotic systems, flying robotic systems, and integration of terrestrial robot and flying robot.He received the FIT Best Paper Award and FIT Young Researchers Award from IEICE & IPSJ, Japan in 2009 and 2010, respectively. He has served many international conferences and journals as a Steering Committee Member and an Editor, respectively. He is the Founding Chair of International Conference on Image Processing and Robotics (ICIPRoB). He is the member of IEEE, IEICE (Japan), SICE (Japan) and SOFT (Japan)

Dang Ngoc Hoang Thanh received the bachelor degree and the M.Sc. degree in applied mathematics from Belarusian State University, Belarus, in 2008 and 2009, respectively, and the Ph.D. degree in computer science from Tula State University, Russia, in 2016.He was a Lecturer with the Department of Information Technology, Hue College of Industry, Vietnam. He is currently an Assistant Professor with the Department of Information Technology, School of Business Information Technology, University of Economics Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. He has more than 50 works on international peer-reviewed journals and conference proceedings, 5 book chapters, 1 book, and 1 European Patent. His research interests include image processing, computer vision, machine learning, data classification, computational mathematics, fuzzy mathematics, and optimization. He is a Member of Scientific Organization INSTICC, ACM, and IAENG. He is also a Member of international conferences committee, such as the IEEE ICCE 2018,Vietnam, IWBBIO, Spain, the IEEE ICIEV, USA, the IEEE ICEEE, Turkey, ICIEE, Japan, ICoCTA, Australia, and ICMTEL, U.K

Tomotaka Kimura (M’09) is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Intelligent Information Engineering, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Doshisha University, Japan. He received the B.Eng., M.Eng., and Ph.D. degrees in communications engineering from Osaka University, Japan, in 2008, 2010, 2015, respectively. From April 2015 to March 2018, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering, Tokyo University of Science, Japan. From April 2018 to March 2020, he was an Assistant Professor in the Department of Intelligent Information Engineering, Faculty of Science and Engineering, Doshisha University. His research interests include performance analysis of communication networks and image processing. He received the IEICE Young Researchers’ Award in 2016. He is a Member of IEEE, IEICE, IEEJ, and JSAI

Hiroharu Kawanaka (M’07) was graduated from Faculty of Engineering at Mie University, Japan, in 1999 and received Dr. of Eng. from Mie University Graduate School of Engineering, Japan, in 2004. After the graduation, he again entered Mie University Graduate School of Medicine to study medical informatics and medical information systems. In 2004, he established a company for medical information systems “Medical Engineering Institute, Inc.” The company develops “CLISTA!,” which is a DataWareHouse for clinical use. Currently, more than 100 large-scale hospitals use the system to analyze clinical data archived in the EHR for clinical studies or business analyses. He is one of the Founders of this company and also a Director of the company from 2004. From 2006, he joined in Graduate School of Engineering, Mie University as an Assistant Professor. He received the Ph. D. degree in medical science (D.M.Sc) from Mie University Graduate School of Medicine in 2009. From 2017, he is an Associate Professor at Graduate School of Engineering, Mie University. Also, he has been invited as a Visiting Associate Professor at Suzuka University of Medical Science, Japan. In 2005, he received a grant “NEDO*1 Industry Fellowship Program” and worked for Mie Technical License Organization (Mie TLO) to support research collaborations, venture companies. His current research interests include medical informatics, medical document image analysis, graphics recognition, welfare information systems, ergonomics, evolutionary computations and its application. He is a Member of IEEE (and SMC Society), HIMSS and some Japanese academic societies
Corresponding author: C. Premachandra is with the Department of Electronic Engineering and Science, Graduate School of Engineering, Shibaura Institute of Technology, Tokyo 135-8548, Japan (e-mail: chintaka@sic.shibaura-it.ac.jp)
Received Date: 2020-03-18
Accepted Date: 2020-04-13

Available Online: 2020-05-15

Abstract

Abstract

Since precise self-position estimation is required for autonomous flight of aerial robots, there has been some studies on self-position estimation of indoor aerial robots. In this study, we tackle the self-position estimation problem by mounting a small downward-facing camera on the chassis of an aerial robot. We obtain robot position by sensing the features on the indoor floor. In this work, we used the vertex points (tile corners) where four tiles on a typical tiled floor connected, as an existing feature of the floor. Furthermore, a small lightweight microcontroller is mounted on the robot to perform image processing for the on-board camera. A lightweight image processing algorithm is developed. So, the real-time image processing could be performed by the microcontroller alone which leads to conduct on-board real time tile corner detection. Furthermore, same microcontroller performs control value calculation for flight commanding. The flight commands are implemented based on the detected tile corner information. The above mentioned all devices are mounted on an actual machine, and the effectiveness of the system was investigated.
- Hovering control,
- light weight algorithm development,
- image processing,
- self-position estimation,
- small aerial robot,
- tile corner sensing

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References

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Highlights

Hovering Control of Small Aerial Robot.
Image Processing Using Small-type and Low-weight Microcontrollers.
Specific Image Feature Point Detection by Weak Directional Pattern Analysis.
On-board Camera Image Processing Based Autonomous Flight Control of UAV.
Simple and Low-cost Image Noise Removal Process.

A Study on Hovering Control of Small Aerial Robot by Sensing Existing Floor Features

doi: 10.1109/JAS.2020.1003240

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