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Title: PATH PLANNING FOR THE HYBRID AERIAL UNDERWATER ROBOTIC SYSTEM.
Creator: Davis, Anthony C., Ouyang, Bing, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract/Description: Marine food chains are highly stressed by aggressive fishing practices and environmental damage. Aquaculture has increasingly become a source of seafood which spares the deleterious impact to wild fisheries, but it requires continuous water quality data to successfully grow and harvest fish. Aerial drones have great potential to monitor large areas quickly and efficiently. The Hybrid Aerial Underwater Robotic System (HAUCS) is a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and underwater...
Show moreMarine food chains are highly stressed by aggressive fishing practices and environmental damage. Aquaculture has increasingly become a source of seafood which spares the deleterious impact to wild fisheries, but it requires continuous water quality data to successfully grow and harvest fish. Aerial drones have great potential to monitor large areas quickly and efficiently. The Hybrid Aerial Underwater Robotic System (HAUCS) is a swarm of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and underwater measurement devices designed to collect water quality data of aquaculture ponds. The routing of drones to cover each fish pond on an aquaculture farm can be reduced to the Vehicle Routing Problem (VRP). A dataset is created to simulate the distribution of ponds on a farm and is used to assess the HAUCS Path Planning Algorithm (HPP). Its performance is compared with the Google Linear Optimization Package (GLOP) and a Graph Attention Model (GAM) for routing around the simulated farms. The three methods are then implemented on a team of waterproof drones and experimentally verified at Southern Illinois University’s (SIU) Aquaculture Research Center. GLOP and GAM are demonstrated to be efficient path planning methods for small farms, while HPP is likely to be more suited to large farms. HAUCS shows great value as a future direction for intelligent aquaculture, but issues with obstacle avoidance and robust waterproofing need to be addressed before commercialization. The future of aquaculture promises more integrated and sustainable operations by mimicking natural systems and leveraging deeper understandings of biology.
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Date Issued: 2022
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00014108
Subject Headings: Drone aircraft, Drones, Aquaculture
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT OF A SECURE SELF-LEVELING WIRELESS RECHARGING PLATFORM FOR AN AERIAL DRONE ON AN UNMANNED SURFACE VESSEL.
Creator: McKinney, Adriana, Dhanak, Manhar, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract/Description: The Design and Development of an automated recharging station for an aerial drone, onboard a small, unmanned surface vessel, is described. Drones require a landing surface that is level within five degrees of the surrounding terrain for repeated reliable landing and takeoff. System constraints and at-sea application necessitate a compact, lightweight, and secure solution. A passive self-leveling platform and an accompanying automated parallel-pusher drone restraint mechanism have been...
Show moreThe Design and Development of an automated recharging station for an aerial drone, onboard a small, unmanned surface vessel, is described. Drones require a landing surface that is level within five degrees of the surrounding terrain for repeated reliable landing and takeoff. System constraints and at-sea application necessitate a compact, lightweight, and secure solution. A passive self-leveling platform and an accompanying automated parallel-pusher drone restraint mechanism have been designed and fabricated to aid in achieving a level landing surface and holding the drone in place while it charges. The self-leveling mechanism has been analyzed and subjected to initial laboratory tests. The testing of the drone restraint mechanism to verify its weight capacity and closing time, and the integration of the platform with a custom conductive contact wireless charging pad are identified as future work. The resulting cohesive unit will be tested for performance optimization and implementation onboard the unmanned surface vehicle.
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Date Issued: 2021
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00013869
Subject Headings: Drone aircraft, Drone aircraft--Control systems--Design and construction, Drone aircraft--Automatic control
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: A Collision-Free Drone Scheduling System.
Creator: Steinberg, Andrew, Cardei, Mihaela, Florida Atlantic University, College of Engineering and Computer Science, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract/Description: Today, drones have been receiving a lot of notice from commercial businesses. Businesses (mainly companies that have delivery services) are trying to expand their productivity in order bring more satisfaction for their loyal customers. One-way companies can expand their delivery services are through the use of delivery drones. Drones are very powerful devices that are going through many evolutionary changes for their uses throughout the years. For many years, researchers in academia have been...
Show moreToday, drones have been receiving a lot of notice from commercial businesses. Businesses (mainly companies that have delivery services) are trying to expand their productivity in order bring more satisfaction for their loyal customers. One-way companies can expand their delivery services are through the use of delivery drones. Drones are very powerful devices that are going through many evolutionary changes for their uses throughout the years. For many years, researchers in academia have been examining how drones can plan their paths along with avoiding collisions of other drones and certain obstacles in the civil airspace. However, researchers have not considered how the motion path planning can a ect the overall scheduling aspect of civilian drones. In this thesis, we propose an algorithm for a collision-free scheduling motion path planning of a set drones such that they avoid certain obstacles as well as maintaining a safety distance from each other.
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Date Issued: 2017
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00004994, http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00004984
Subject Headings: Dissertations, Academic -- Florida Atlantic University, Drone aircraft., Algorithms., Scheduling., Drone aircraft--Safety measures.
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: PATH PLANNING ALGORITHMS FOR UNMANNED AIRCRAFT SYSTEMS WITH A SPACE-TIME GRAPH.
Creator: Steinberg, Andrew, Cardei, Mihaela, Cardei, Ionut, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract/Description: Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have grown in popularity due to their widespread potential applications, including efficient package delivery, monitoring, surveillance, search and rescue operations, agricultural uses, along with many others. As UAS become more integrated into our society and airspace, it is anticipated that the development and maintenance of a path planning collision-free system will become imperative, as the safety and efficiency of the airspace represents a priority. The...
Show moreUnmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) have grown in popularity due to their widespread potential applications, including efficient package delivery, monitoring, surveillance, search and rescue operations, agricultural uses, along with many others. As UAS become more integrated into our society and airspace, it is anticipated that the development and maintenance of a path planning collision-free system will become imperative, as the safety and efficiency of the airspace represents a priority. The dissertation defines this problem as the UAS Collision-free Path Planning Problem. The overall objective of the dissertation is to design an on-demand, efficient and scalable aerial highway path planning system for UAS. The dissertation explores two solutions to this problem. The first solution proposes a space-time algorithm that searches for shortest paths in a space-time graph. The solution maps the aerial traffic map to a space-time graph that is discretized on the inter-vehicle safety distance. This helps compute safe trajectories by design. The mechanism uses space-time edge pruning to maintain the dynamic availability of edges as vehicles move on a trajectory. Pruning edges is critical to protect active UAS from collisions and safety hazards. The dissertation compares the solution with another related work to evaluate improvements in delay, run time scalability, and admission success while observing up to 9000 flight requests in the network. The second solution to the path planning problem uses a batch planning algorithm. This is a new mechanism that processes a batch of flight requests with prioritization on the current slack time. This approach aims to improve the planning success ratio. The batch planning algorithm is compared with the space-time algorithm to ascertain improvements in admission ratio, delay ratio, and running time, in scenarios with up to 10000 flight requests.
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Date Issued: 2021
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00013696
Subject Headings: Unmanned aerial vehicles, Drone aircraft, Drone aircraft--Automatic control, Space and time, Algorithms
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: SPACE-TIME GRAPH PATH PLANNING FOR UAS TRAFFIC MANAGEMENT SYSTEMS.
Creator: Papa, Rafael, Cardei, Mihaela, Cardei, Ionut, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, College of Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract/Description: The unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has evolved considerably in recent years and the global demand for package delivery is expected to grow even more during COVID-19 and the social distance era. The low cost of acquisition, payload capacity, maneuverability, and the ability to y at low-altitude with a very low cost of operation, make UAVs a perfect fit to revolutionize the payload transportation of small items. The large-scale adoption of drone package delivery in high-density urban...
Show moreThe unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) technology has evolved considerably in recent years and the global demand for package delivery is expected to grow even more during COVID-19 and the social distance era. The low cost of acquisition, payload capacity, maneuverability, and the ability to y at low-altitude with a very low cost of operation, make UAVs a perfect fit to revolutionize the payload transportation of small items. The large-scale adoption of drone package delivery in high-density urban areas can be challenging and the Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) operators must ensure safety, security, efficiency and equity of the airspace system. In order to address some of these challenges, FAA and NASA have developed a new architecture that will support a set of services to enable cooperative management of low-altitude operations between UAS operators. The architecture is still in its conceptual stage and designing a mechanism that ensures the fair distribution of the available airspace to commercial applications has become increasingly important. Considering that, the path planning is one of the most important problems to be explored. The objective is not only to find an optimal and shortest path but also to provide a collision-free environment to the UAVs. Taking into consideration all these important aspects and others such as serving on-demand requests, flight duration limitation due to energy constraints, maintaining the safety distance to avoid collisions, and using warehouses as starting and ending points in parcel delivery, this dissertation proposes: (i) an energy-constrained scheduling mechanism using a multi-source A* algorithm variant, and (ii) a generalized path planning mechanism using a space-time graph with multi-source multi-destination BFS generalization to ensure pre-flight UAV collision-free trajectories. This dissertation also uses the generalized path planning mechanism to solve the energy-constrained drone delivery problem. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithms are computationally efficient and scalable with the number of requests and graph size.
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Date Issued: 2021
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00013861
Subject Headings: Unmanned aerial vehicles, Drone aircraft, Space and time
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: Using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) surveys and traditional methods to examine influences on loggerhead sea turtle (Caretta caretta) nest site selection.
Creator: Manestar, Summer, Briggs, Tiffany Roberts, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Geosciences, Charles E. Schmidt College of Science
Abstract/Description: This study examined the environmental and anthropogenic factors that may influence loggerhead sea turtle nest site selection and how these factors vary between successful nesting attempts and false crawls on a high-density sea turtle nesting beach in Boca Raton, Florida. Beach morphology, sand texture, and nests’ proximity to artificial structures were measured using a combination of drone-based photogrammetry, traditional surveys with Real Time Kinematic Global Positioning System (RTK GPS),...
Show moreThis study examined the environmental and anthropogenic factors that may influence loggerhead sea turtle nest site selection and how these factors vary between successful nesting attempts and false crawls on a high-density sea turtle nesting beach in Boca Raton, Florida. Beach morphology, sand texture, and nests’ proximity to artificial structures were measured using a combination of drone-based photogrammetry, traditional surveys with Real Time Kinematic Global Positioning System (RTK GPS), and sediment granulometry. Proximity to dune crossover stairs was significantly different between nests and false crawls, and the probability of a false crawl occurring decreased as proximity to dune crossover stairs increased. The results of this study will provide researchers with a new tool for nest monitoring and a better understanding of the microhabitat cues that may influence loggerhead sea turtle nest site selection and aid in guiding beach and sea turtle management decisions.
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Date Issued: 2023
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00014184
Subject Headings: Loggerhead sea turtles, Drone aircraft, Sea turtles--Nests, Geomorphology
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: OBJECT-BASED LAND COVER CLASSIFICATION OF UAV TRUE COLOR IMAGERY.
Creator: Castillo, Stephen M., Nagarajan, Sudhagar, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatics Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract/Description: Land cover classification is necessary for understanding the state of the surface of the Earth at varying regions of interest. Knowledge of the Earth’s surface is critical in land-use planning, especially for the project study area Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse Outstanding Natural Area, where various vegetation, wild-life, and cultural components rely on adequate land-cover knowledge. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the capability of UAV true color imagery for land cover...
Show moreLand cover classification is necessary for understanding the state of the surface of the Earth at varying regions of interest. Knowledge of the Earth’s surface is critical in land-use planning, especially for the project study area Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse Outstanding Natural Area, where various vegetation, wild-life, and cultural components rely on adequate land-cover knowledge. The purpose of this research is to demonstrate the capability of UAV true color imagery for land cover classification. In addition to the objective of land cover classification, comparison of varying spatial resolutions of the imagery will be analyzed in the accuracy assessment of the output thematic maps. These resolutions will also be compared at varying training sample sizes to see which configuration performed best.
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Date Issued: 2020
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00013454
Subject Headings: Land cover, Unmanned aerial vehicles, Drone aircraft in remote sensing, Images, Classification
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: Hummingbird: An UAV-aided Energy E cient Algorithm for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks.
Creator: Papa, Rafael, Cardei, Mihaela, Florida Atlantic University, College of Engineering and Computer Science, Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract/Description: Energy e ciency is a critical constraint in wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of battery-powered sensor nodes, connected to each other and equipped with low-power transmission radios. Usually, the sensor nodes closer to the sink are more likely to become overloaded and subject to draining their battery faster than the nodes farther away, creating a funneling e ect. The use of a mobile device as a sink node to perform data gathering is a well...
Show moreEnergy e ciency is a critical constraint in wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) consist of a large number of battery-powered sensor nodes, connected to each other and equipped with low-power transmission radios. Usually, the sensor nodes closer to the sink are more likely to become overloaded and subject to draining their battery faster than the nodes farther away, creating a funneling e ect. The use of a mobile device as a sink node to perform data gathering is a well known solution to balance the energy consumption in the entire network. To address this problem, in this work we consider the use of an UAV as a mobile sink. An unmanned aircraft vehicle (UAV) is an aircraft without a human pilot on-board, popularly known as a Drone. In this thesis, besides the use of the UAV as a mobile sink node, we propose an UAV-aided algorithm for data gathering in wireless sensor networks, called Humming- bird. Our distributed algorithm is energy-e cient. Rather than using an arbitrary path, the UAV implements an approximation algorithm to solve the well-known NP- Hard problem, the Traveling Salesman Problem (or TSP), to setup the trajectory of node points to visit for data gathering. In our approach, both the path planning and the data gathering are performed by the UAV, and this is seamlessly integrated with sensor data reporting. The results, using ns-3 network simulator show that our algorithm improves the network lifetime compared to regular (non-UAV) data gathering, especially for data intensive applications.
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Date Issued: 2018
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00013093
Subject Headings: Wireless sensor networks--Energy conservation., Wireless sensor nodes., Drone aircraft.
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: MULTISPECTRAL UAS BASED COASTAL CHANGE DETECTION METHODS.
Creator: Rajkumar, Monica, Nagarajan, Sudhagar, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatics Engineering, College of Engineering and Computer Science
Abstract/Description: Coastal landscape plays a vital role in reflecting various natural processes. Vegetation resource management improves the quality of life above the surface of the earth. Due to factors such as climatic change, urban development, and global warming, monitoring the coastal region as well as its vegetation has indeed become a challenge to mankind. The purpose of the study is to propose an effective low-cost methodology to monitor the 120- acre Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse Outstanding Natural Area ...
Show moreCoastal landscape plays a vital role in reflecting various natural processes. Vegetation resource management improves the quality of life above the surface of the earth. Due to factors such as climatic change, urban development, and global warming, monitoring the coastal region as well as its vegetation has indeed become a challenge to mankind. The purpose of the study is to propose an effective low-cost methodology to monitor the 120- acre Jupiter Inlet Lighthouse Outstanding Natural Area (ONA) located in Jupiter, Florida (USA) using Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) Imagery deployed with RedEdge Micasense Multispectral sensor having five bands. Since, UAS provides high resolution imagery at lower altitudes, it has a lot of potential for variety of applications. This research aims to (1) Automate the extraction of shoreline and coastline through Modified Normalized Difference Index (MNDI), thereby comparing it with the manually digitized shoreline using transect-based analysis (2) Automate the volume change computation, as the area has been affected due to various natural and anthropogenic factors in the past few decades. (3) Perform shoreline change detection for the time period 1953 to 2021 (4) Develop an algorithm to differentiate ground and non-ground points along the shore region and generate Digital Terrain Model (DTM) (5) Land use and Land cover (LULC) mapping using different band combinations and compare its result using deep learning approach.
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Date Issued: 2022
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00013931
Subject Headings: Coastal zone management--Florida, Jupiter Inlet Light (Fla.), Multispectral imaging, Drone aircraft, ArcGIS
Format: Document (PDF)

Title: EVALUATING UNMANNED AIRCRAFT SYSTEM PHOTOGRAMMETRY FOR COASTAL FLORIDA EVERGLADES RESTORATION AND MANAGEMENT.
Creator: Durgan, Sara D., Zhang, Caiyun, Florida Atlantic University, Department of Geosciences, Charles E. Schmidt College of Science
Abstract/Description: The Florida Everglades ecosystem is experiencing increasing threats from anthropogenic modification of water flow, spread of invasive species, sea level rise (SLR), and more frequent and/or intense hurricanes. Restoration efforts aimed at rehabilitating these ongoing and future disturbances are currently underway through the implementation of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). Efficacy of these restoration activities can be further improved with accurate and site-specific...
Show moreThe Florida Everglades ecosystem is experiencing increasing threats from anthropogenic modification of water flow, spread of invasive species, sea level rise (SLR), and more frequent and/or intense hurricanes. Restoration efforts aimed at rehabilitating these ongoing and future disturbances are currently underway through the implementation of the Comprehensive Everglades Restoration Plan (CERP). Efficacy of these restoration activities can be further improved with accurate and site-specific information on the current state of the coastal wetland habitats. In order to produce such assessments, digital datasets of the appropriate accuracy and scale are needed. These datasets include orthoimagery to delineate wetland areas and map vegetation cover as well as accurate 3-dimensional (3-D) models to characterize hydrology, physiochemistry, and habitat vulnerability.
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Date Issued: 2020
PURL: http://purl.flvc.org/fau/fd/FA00013501
Subject Headings: Everglades (Fla )--Environmental conditions--Remote sensing, Aerial photogrammetry, Wetland restoration--Florida--Everglades, Image analysis, Aerial photogrammetry--Data processing, Drone aircraft
Format: Document (PDF)

Drone aircraft (7)	+ -
Unmanned aerial vehicles (3)	+ -
Drone aircraft--Automatic control (2)	+ -
Drone aircraft. (2)	+ -
Space and time (2)	+ -

Aerial photogrammetry (1)	+ -
Aerial photogrammetry--Data processing (1)	+ -
Algorithms (1)	+ -
Algorithms. (1)	+ -
Aquaculture (1)	+ -
ArcGIS (1)	+ -
Classification (1)	+ -
Coastal zone management--Florida (1)	+ -
Dissertations, Academic -- Florida Atlantic University (1)	+ -
Drone aircraft in remote sensing (1)	+ -
Drone aircraft--Control systems--Design and construction (1)	+ -
Drone aircraft--Safety measures. (1)	+ -
Drones (1)	+ -
Everglades (Fla )--Environmental conditions--Remote sensing (1)	+ -
Geomorphology (1)	+ -
Image analysis (1)	+ -
Images (1)	+ -
Jupiter Inlet Light (Fla.) (1)	+ -
Land cover (1)	+ -
Loggerhead sea turtles (1)	+ -
Multispectral imaging (1)	+ -
Scheduling. (1)	+ -
Sea turtles--Nests (1)	+ -
Wetland restoration--Florida--Everglades (1)	+ -
Wireless sensor networks--Energy conservation. (1)	+ -

Florida Atlantic University (10)	+ -
College of Engineering and Computer Science (8)	+ -
Department of Computer and Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (5)	+ -
Cardei, Mihaela (4)	+ -
Cardei, Ionut (2)	+ -

Charles E. Schmidt College of Science (2)	+ -
Department of Civil, Environmental and Geomatics Engineering (2)	+ -
Department of Geosciences (2)	+ -
Nagarajan, Sudhagar (2)	+ -
Papa, Rafael (2)	+ -
Steinberg, Andrew (2)	+ -
Briggs, Tiffany Roberts (1)	+ -
Castillo, Stephen M. (1)	+ -
Davis, Anthony C. (1)	+ -
Department of Ocean and Mechanical Engineering (1)	+ -
Dhanak, Manhar (1)	+ -
Durgan, Sara D. (1)	+ -
Manestar, Summer (1)	+ -
McKinney, Adriana (1)	+ -
Ouyang, Bing (1)	+ -
Rajkumar, Monica (1)	+ -
Zhang, Caiyun (1)	+ -

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