Autonomous perching and installation of small devices on a street lamp

Abstract

In the last decade, with the maturing capabilities of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) for autonomous operations, there has been an increased interest in UAVs physically interacting with the environment. This is useful for those tasks that have to be carried out in remote locations, due to the significant safety risks to people and the difficulties of access by ground vehicles. Moreover, there are an estimated 7.5 million street lamps across the UK, which present a dense array of elevated sites from which crucial elements of various counter-terrorism operations could be conducted remotely, using the UAV as a platform for the efficient deployment of tactical sensors.

This paper presents a low-cost UAV system using commercial-off-the-shelf (COTS) components, that is capable of autonomously perching on a street lamppost, and performing sensor (camera) (un-)installation on the lamppost with its onboard robotic arm. The platform’s autonomous perching was realized by integration of an Infra-Red (IR) tracking sensor and a laser rangefinder which tracks an IR emitter pre-installed on the lamppost. The perching mechanism is also described in this paper. Additionally, a four degree of freedom (DoF) robotic arm was implemented on the platform to perform sensor (un-)installation, which was autonomously controlled by an Arduino, with an IR ranger for sensor detection.

The system provides an efficient, safe and low-cost method for installing and removing temporary security sensors to/from street lamps to combat various anti-social behaviour offences. It can also be deployed with alternative sensors for disaster response or Chemical, biological, radiological and nuclear (CBRN) measurement.

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Identifiers

ORCID for Chang Liu: orcid.org/0000-0002-6967-5159

ORCID for Stephen Prior: orcid.org/0000-0002-4993-4942

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