Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System
With recent regulatory efforts to reduce restrictions placed on the operation of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) in the United States, it is likely that in the next few years, these vehicles will become commonplace in the commercial marketplace as they are in military environments. In order to reduce the...
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Format: | Article |
Language: | en_US |
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International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles
2014
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Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86945 |
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author | Cummings, M.L. Jackson, K. Quimby, P. Pitman, D. |
author_facet | Cummings, M.L. Jackson, K. Quimby, P. Pitman, D. |
author_sort | Cummings, M.L. |
collection | MIT |
description | With recent regulatory efforts to reduce restrictions placed on the operation of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) in the United States, it is likely that in the next few years, these vehicles will become commonplace in the commercial marketplace as they are in military environments. In order to reduce the barrier to entry for operations of MAVs, customers of these systems will require ease of operation as well as minimal training time in order to reduce costs. To this end, a smartphone application was developed to control a
quadrotor remotely in the exploration of an unknown environment, and tested for users with only three minutes of training. Initial motion capture room tests produced encouraging results for localization and target identification tasks, however, such environments are inherently artificial and the extensibility of such results is limited. A follow-on outdoor field study was conducted in order to compare the indoor and outdoor results and to assess operator performance in a realistic environment. Performance on the outdoor localization tasks was comparable to the indoor study, however, participants
generally performed slightly worse on the target identification task in the outdoor experiment, attributed to camera image quality and GPS localization issues. Other issues such as wind and flight safety considerations are discussed. |
first_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:23:32Z |
format | Article |
id | mit-1721.1/86945 |
institution | Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
language | en_US |
last_indexed | 2024-09-23T14:23:32Z |
publishDate | 2014 |
publisher | International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles |
record_format | dspace |
spelling | mit-1721.1/869452019-04-11T12:24:53Z Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System Cummings, M.L. Jackson, K. Quimby, P. Pitman, D. Micro Air Vehicles MAVs regulations controls With recent regulatory efforts to reduce restrictions placed on the operation of Micro Air Vehicles (MAVs) in the United States, it is likely that in the next few years, these vehicles will become commonplace in the commercial marketplace as they are in military environments. In order to reduce the barrier to entry for operations of MAVs, customers of these systems will require ease of operation as well as minimal training time in order to reduce costs. To this end, a smartphone application was developed to control a quadrotor remotely in the exploration of an unknown environment, and tested for users with only three minutes of training. Initial motion capture room tests produced encouraging results for localization and target identification tasks, however, such environments are inherently artificial and the extensibility of such results is limited. A follow-on outdoor field study was conducted in order to compare the indoor and outdoor results and to assess operator performance in a realistic environment. Performance on the outdoor localization tasks was comparable to the indoor study, however, participants generally performed slightly worse on the target identification task in the outdoor experiment, attributed to camera image quality and GPS localization issues. Other issues such as wind and flight safety considerations are discussed. The Office of Naval Research and the Boeing Company sponsored this research. 2014-05-14T17:47:04Z 2014-05-14T17:47:04Z 2012 Article http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86945 Cummings, M.L., Jackson,K., Quimby, P., & D. Pitman, Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System, International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles, Vol. 4, No. 3, pp. 165-177, 2012. en_US application/pdf International Journal of Micro Air Vehicles |
spellingShingle | Micro Air Vehicles MAVs regulations controls Cummings, M.L. Jackson, K. Quimby, P. Pitman, D. Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System |
title | Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System |
title_full | Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System |
title_fullStr | Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System |
title_full_unstemmed | Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System |
title_short | Field Testing of a Quad Rotor Smartphone Control System |
title_sort | field testing of a quad rotor smartphone control system |
topic | Micro Air Vehicles MAVs regulations controls |
url | http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/86945 |
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