Autonomous quadrotor helicopters to the rescue!

What if we could eliminate the need for human intervention in the most dangerous and deadly situations? What if the ability to save a life was not done by endangering the life of another? What if the safety of an area could be determined without the need to send someone in to check the premises? These are a few of the reasons why autonomous vehicles and equipment have become such a fascinating area of development in today's world. The technology available and its integration have brought us closer to the reality of such scenarios occurring not only in a threatening situations across the globe, but in our every day lives whether it be for security and surveillance or search and rescue missions.

Researchers at Stanford University have developed STARMAC (Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control). This research shows how using the current technology available, students have created a multi-vehicle test bed used to demonstrate new concepts in multi-agent control on a real-world platform. The team created a small and light, low cost design which has provided numerous opportunities for innovative work. STARMAC consists of up to eight quadrotor vehicles. The system uses Crossbow's Stargate platform for position estimation and control. The Stargate platform was pre-configured with a compact flash 802.11b WiFi card and field testing revealed significant improvements in communication robustness between the base station and vehicle compared with earlier designs.

The video below highlights the development work being done and the ultimate goal of this type of research:

 

Whether this technology will be used for cinematography allowing aircraft to be flown in more cutting-edge maneuvers to gain better aerial shots than humanly possible, or creating better topographical maps for aerial mapping by flying closer to the ground than is humanly comfortable, or entering devastated areas to assess damage when humanly inaccessible...the list can go on and on. The bottom line is that this type of research and development continues to pave the path to a future where human life could be more protected in situations where it has been endangered in the past.

An ēKo-nomic solution for Nursery Monitoring

If you took a look at the plants in my yard, or had caught a glimpse of the few potted plants I attempted to care for in college it would be quite obvious that my thumbs are not green. The soil would usually be too wet or too dry and the leaves wilted leading to my plant's eventual demise. Imagine having acres and acres of plants to monitor and care for...is there a way to do this ēKo-nomically?

The FLOW-AID project is working to contribute to the sustainability of irrigated agriculture by developing, testing in relevant conditions, and fine-tuning through feedback, an irrigation management system that can be used at farm level in situations where there is limited water supply and water quality. The FLOW-AID project in collaboration with the University of Pisa has installed an ēKo system at an experimental nursery in Tuscany, Italy to monitor soil moisture at eight different locations in the nursery.

The system is designed to serve as an assistant for communication with higher level water management systems at basin scale for long and short term water use planning and prediction. This project integrates innovative sensor technologies into a decision support system for irrigation management while taking into consideration several factors in a number of third country partners. The ēKo nodes have been deployed in eight locations over the nursery in Tuscany. The ēKo ES1101 soil moisture sensors are monitoring the ornamental shrubs and trees being grown to make sure that all the water is being used efficiently and effectively.

The project results yielded will showcase the development and testing of new and innovative, but simple and affordable, technical concepts for irrigation under deficit conditions used at the farm level in a large variety of set-ups and constraints. It will show the development of a water management support system (DSS) that contains an expert system (off-line/long-term) to assist in farm zoning and crop plan in view of expected water availability (amount and quality) with a link to Basin Management, as well as a crop response module that can be incorporated into the irrigation scheduler that allocates available water(s) among several plots and schedules irrigation for each one with a link to Basin Management.

The FLOW-AID project has set up four test sites in various market conditions with different irrigation structures, crop types, local water supplies and constraints. The hardware/software systems used must adapt the general concept of water management to the local situation by using appropriate parts of it at the global sites in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey and Italy.

The information being collected at the site in Tuscany, Italy, by the researchers at the University of Pisa for container crops and nursery grown crops is available to users over the internet via ēKo's EG2100 gateway device and the ēKoView interface. This device provides, in a fully integrated package the connection between ēKo Sensor Nodes deployed and the ēKo Gateway. The work done by FLOW-AID will be carried out between 2006 and 2009 as a 6th Framework European project under the call for water in agriculture, new systems and technologies for irrigation and drainage. For more information on the ēKo system, click here.