UAV-Search

Backstory

This project is done as part of my graduation project as a senior aerospace engineering student at Cairo University. The project is also a step towards participating in the "UAV Challenge - Medical Rescue" competition in Australia (that was meant to be on septemper, 2020 but now is planned to take place on 2021 due to SARS-CoV-2 "COVID-19" outbreak)

What is this?

• Video Demo
• This is an ongoing project to implement a "search & rescue" mission with a VTOL aircraft.
• It's meant to be running on an on-board computer (which is currently decided to be the Nvidia Jetson Nano) that would work with the Pixhawk controller running the PX4 firmware [Communication are done via the MAVlink protocol using the MAVSDK-Python library].
• Right now, I have implemented the following:
  • A* 2D path planning:
    • Currently designed to run as an 'offline' planner that would only run once at the beginning of the mission, knowing the map, the no-fly zones and the goal/target location, the planner plans a path to the goal location avoiding the no-fly zones.
    • Returned path waypoints are uploaded to the Pixhawk controller as Mission Waypoints via MAVSDK.
  • Object Detection:
    • Designed to detect objects [humans in the case of UAV Challenge] using a camera mounted on the aircraft.
    • Currently implemented with Tensorflow2, the code can use mainly three different models which are:
      1. YOLOv3 & YOLOv3-Tiny - running with tensorflow2 (will be optimized with tensorRT in the future to run even faster on the on-board computer)
      2. SSD-mobilenet-COCO (all versions) & SSDlite from the tensorflow detection model zoo [not optimized]
      3. A TensorRT optimized model of the original SSDlite-mobilenet model. [currently runs at >10fps on Nvidia Jetson Nano]
  • Camera-Based Localization of Detected Objects:
    • Video Demo
    • Currently implements localization based on the simple triangle-similarity method, assumming the camera is always facing directly downwards.
    • Located objects pixel center is transformed into the global coordinates, based on the UAV location at the time of capturing the image and the yaw angle of the UAV.

Clone Notes

• This repository contains some files that are tracked by "git-lfs" (git large file system). To clone the full version of these files you need to git clone <repo-link> then navigate to the repo directory and git lfs pull to pull the full version of the lfs tracked files into your directory.