Drone Mission Simulations

This lecture overviews various drone mission simulator architectures, notably AirSim and Gazebo. Their use in various drone scenarios are presented: pilot training, synthetic data generation for DNN training, drone cinematography parameter selection based on drone output video quality. Finally various examples of drone mission simulations on Gazebo are presented.

Drone Swarms

This lecture overviews Drone Swarms that has many applications in autonomous drones. It covers the following topics in detail: Drone swarm architectures, Drone2drone communications, Drone collision avoidance, Drone migration, Drone swarm localization and monitoring.

Multiple Drone Mission Planning and Control

In this lecture, first the audiovisual shooting mission is formally defined. The introduced audiovisual shooting definitions are encoded in mission planning commands, i.e., navigation and shooting action vocabulary, and their corresponding parameters. The drone mission commands, as well as the hardware/software architecture required for manual/autonomous mission execution are described.  The software infrastructure includes the planning modules, that assign, monitor and schedule different behaviors/tasks to the drone swarm team according to director and environmental requirements, and the control modules, which execute the planning mission by translating high-level commands to into desired drone+camera configurations, producing commands for autopilot, camera and gimbal of the drone swarm.

Introduction to Multiple Drone Systems

This lecture will provide the general context for this new and emerging topic, presenting the aims of multiple drone systems, focusing on their sensing and perception. Drone mission formalization, planning and control will be overviewed. Then multiple drone communication issues will be presented, notably drone2ground communication and multisource video streaming. In drone vision, the challenges (especially from an image/video analysis and computer vision point of view), the important issues to be tackled, the limitations imposed by drone hardware, regulations and safety considerations will be presented. A multiple drone platform will be the detailed during the second part of the lecture, beginning with platform hardware overview, issues and requirements and proceeding by discussing safety and privacy protection issues. Finally, platform integration will be the closing topic of the lecture, elaborating on drone mission planning, object detection and tracking, UAV-based cinematography, target pose estimation, privacy protection, ethical and regulatory issues, potential landing site detection, crowd detection, semantic map annotation and simulations. Two drone use cases will be overviewed: a) multiple drones in media production and b) drone-based infrastructure surveillance, notably of electrical installations.

Introduction to UAV Multicopters

This lecture overviews Introduction to UAV Multicopters that has many applications in autonomous drones. It covers the following topics in detail: UAV Categories, UAV subsystems, How multicopters fly, Flight modes, Applications in cinematography, surveillance, inspection, agriculture etc.

Autonomous Underwater Vessels

This lecture overviews Autonomous Underwater Vessels that has many applications in ocean engineering. It covers the following topics in detail: AUV technologies, sensors, communications, applications.