Onboard Control and Visual Guidance of a New Prototype of Urban Vehicle
- Project title: Onboard Control and Visual Guidance of a New Prototype of Urban Vehicle
- Funding: CDTI
- Entity: SIEMENS S.A.
- Project starting date: Feb. 2011
- Project end date: Jul. 2012
- Project role: MSc. Student Researcher and technical project responsible (end)
Abstract:
Low-altitude unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), commonly referred to as drones, have enabled a plethora of personal and commercial applications including aerial photography and sightseeing, parcel delivery, search-and-rescue, monitoring and surveillance, and precision farming. Improving the operation range and safety of drones has led to increasing interest in connecting drones over licensed spectrum and cellular infrastructure for reliable beyond-visual-LoS communication and control.Meanwhile, mobile aerial relays/BSs deployed onboard drones can establish, enhance, and recover cellular coverage in real-time for ground users in remote, densely populated, or disastrous areas where cellular infrastructure is unavailable, becomes congested, or has been sabotaged, respectively. This new cellular communication and networking paradigm unlocks an unprecedented opportunity for intelligent cellular network operation in both normal and disaster scenarios, whereby the cellular infrastructure would no longer keep a fixed topology but support versatile spatial-temporal variations proactively and intelligently adapted to the cellular traffic demands.
To address the socioeconomic impact of emerging aerial users and aerial relays/BSs, both industry and academia are embracing a technological transition towards 3D mobile communication and networking in the forthcoming fifth-generation (5G) rollout, where the sky as the host of various airborne applications and services would be interconnected with terrestrial cellular networks to improve communication and daily life.
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