Thesis subject

Development of a UAV-based testbed for teaching undergrad students

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) shipped with on-board sensors have become an effective remote sensing (RS) tool in agriculture. They have been used mainly for image surveying and there are still many helpful aerial RS application to develop. Working with UAV it’s an added valuable point for any professional who wishes to succeed in this competitive market. Herein, you will have the opportunity to work in a novel and ambitious project with UAV applied to the emerging fields.

background
Aerial surveying (AS) is probably the most demanded application in remote sensing (RS) when it comes to the employment of UAV. In the Laboratory of Geo- information and Remote Sensing we believe that its time for students to get close to this practice and have knowledge of the principles of AS.

Objectives
This thesis addresses the development of a framework of tools with open-source software for teaching aerial survey principles to undergrad students. This will be achieved within the main steps:

  1. Review of the state-of-the art about teaching with UAV;
  2. Define the system requisites;
  3. Development and/or integration of software modules; and
  4. Field tests.

Literature

  • David Zapata, Mario Garzón, João Valente, Antonio Barrientos, QuadLab - A Project-Based Learning Toolkit for Automation and Robotics Engineering Education. Journal of Intelligent & Robotic Systems, 81(1):97-116, 2015
  • http://wiki.ros.org
  • http://www.coppeliarobotics.com

Requirements (optional)

  • UAV enthusiast
  • Willing for learning novel software tools
  • Excited to work in robotics