HAWK: An unmanned mini helicopter-based aerial wireless kit for localization

—This paper presents a fully functional and highly portable mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system, HAWK, for conducting aerial localization. HAWK is a programmable mini helicopter - Draganflyer X6 - armed with a wireless sniffer Nokia N900. We developed custom PI-Control laws to implement a robust waypoint algorithm for the mini helicopter to fly a planned route. A Moore space filling curve is designed as a flight route for HAWK to survey a specific area. A set of theorems were derived to calculate the minimum Moore curve level for sensing all targets in the area with minimum flight distance. With such a flight strategy, we can confine the location of a target of interest to a small hot area. We can recursively apply the Moore curve based flight route to the hot area for a fine-grained localization of a target of interest. Therefore, HAWK does not rely on a positioning infrastructure for localization. We have conducted extensive experiments to validate the feasibility o...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2012
• Where: INFOCOM
• Authors: Zhongli Liu, Yinjie Chen, Benyuan Liu, Chengyu Cao, Xinwen Fu
• Keywords: Communications, Curve Level, INFOCOM 2012, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle, Wireless Sniffer