Methodology for Indoor Positioning and Landing of an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle in a Smart Manufacturing Plant for Light Part Delivery

Abstract

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) are spreading their usage in many areas, including last-mile distribution. In this research, a UAV is used for performing light parts delivery to workstation operators within a manufacturing plant, where GPS is no valid solution for indoor positioning. A generic localization solution is designed to provide navigation using RFID received signal strength measures and sonar values. A system on chip computer is onboarded with two missions: first, compute positioning and provide communication with backend software; second, provide an artificial vision system that cooperates with UAV’s navigation to perform landing procedures. An Industrial Internet of Things solution is defined for workstations to allow wireless mesh communication between the logistics vehicle and the backend software. Design is corroborated through experiments that validate planned solutions.

A RFID-Integrated Framework for Tag Anti-Collision in UAV-Aided VANETs

“…There have been some works about RFID-integrated UAV-aided networks [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23]. Currently, Buffi et al in [11] presented a drone-based UHF-RFID tag identification scheme, which can be applied in indoor scenarios and VANET environments.…”

“…In addition, Won et al in [17] and Zhang et al in [18] introduced machine learning and deep reinforcement learning to RFID-integrated UAV-aided networks and investigated the tag estimation scheme. In addition, indoor positioning [19], resource allocation [20], tag localization [21], remote sensing [22], and electromagnetic modeling [23] have also been investigated. Furthermore, we summarized the UHF frequency bands adopted by major countries as shown in Table 1.…”

“…Nevertheless, there are still some open problems that remain to be further investigated. First, the proposed RFID-integrated UAVaided networks in [11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23] consider the flexibility of UAVs but ignore the characteristics of the dense RFID environment, such as the adaptive power control for the reader. Moreover, the designed tag anti-collision schemes in [27][28][29][30][31][32] are usually based on the conventional single frequency tags, which leave multifrequency tags out of consideration.…”

Indoor Mapping of Magnetic Fields Using UAV Equipped with Fluxgate Magnetometer

“…If we consider magnetic sensors, they are usually only used as a support for indoor navigation systems [ 26 ] because due to missing signals from satellite navigation systems, indoor navigation is one of the more challenging problems that need to be solved regarding the ongoing extensive research in the area of UAVs [ 27 , 28 , 29 , 30 ]. Therefore, many types of visual-based [ 31 , 32 , 33 ], visual-aided [ 34 ], acoustic [ 35 ], and ultrasonic methods [ 36 ] and the related integrated navigation, localization [ 37 , 38 ], positioning and landing systems [ 39 , 40 , 41 ], indoor path-planning [ 42 ], and mapping guidance algorithms [ 43 ] have been developed. There are only a few experimental systems that are based on the magnetic sensors used for navigation purposes [ 44 , 45 , 46 , 47 ] since the field has to be mapped with sufficient precision and sensitivity.…”

Novel Solutions to the Three-Anchor ToA-Based Three-Dimensional Positioning Problem

“…The diverse civilian applications of UAVs include [46][47][48] communication relaying, traffic monitoring, firefighting, security, plant protection, logistics, reconnaissance, maritime observation, wildlife monitoring, search and rescue, remote sensing, photography, filmmaking, demining, emergency response [49], precision agriculture [50], mapping [51], civil engineering [52], law enforcement [53], and scientific research [54]. UAVs have increasing benefits in supply chain logistics, inventory applications [55][56][57][58], distribution centers [59][60][61], and in metropolitan areas [62] due to their capacity to ship up to sixkilogram payloads, up to sixteen-kilometer ranges [63]. Therefore, UAV-based package delivery is one of the most featured applications [64,65].…”