Many unmanned aerial vehicle surveillance and monitoring applications require observations at precise locations over long periods of time, ideally days or weeks at a time (e.g. ecosystem monitoring), which has been impractical due to limited endurance and the requirement of humans in the loop for operation. To overcome these limitations, we propose a fully autonomous small rotorcraft UAS that is capable of performing repeated sorties for long-term observation missions without any human intervention. We address two key technologies that are critical for such a system: full platform autonomy including emergency response to enable mission execution independently from human operators, and the ability of vision-based precision landing on a recharging station for automated energy replenishment. Experimental results of up to 11 hours of fully autonomous operation in indoor and outdoor environments illustrate the capability of our system.
@article{arxiv.1810.05683,
title = {Long-Duration Autonomy for Small Rotorcraft UAS including Recharging},
author = {Christian Brommer and Danylo Malyuta and Daniel Hentzen and Roland Brockers},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1810.05683},
year = {2018}
}