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Newfoundland and Labrador has offshore oil-and-gas installations which greatly contribute to the industrial development of the province: Hibernia, Terra Nova, White Rose and Hebron. These installations require large capital investments, significant effort and cost for operating and maintaining. The installations also operate in harsh weather conditions which provide for complicated logistical challenges. The utilization of MAV will improve the efficiency, reliability and safety of operating under such conditions [1-3]: Live Flare and Chimney Inspection Thermal Inspection Structural Inspection Emergency Response

INTRODUCTION

RESEARCH OBJECTIVES

The overall research objective is to develop an advanced control system for a quadrotor that will operate autonomously in constrained work environments. The control system will consist of three main parts: - Geometric Navigation Unit produces suitable paths to reach desired positions, navigates the quadrotor to follow the produced path, and detects obstacles while following the trajectory. - Geometric Motion Controller Unit is built on Geometric Control theory for quadrotor motion control. Based on desired trajectory, this Unit will compute the desired angular velocity of each rotor in order to produce the movement and follow the desired trajectory. - State Estimation Unit (Localization) is designed to update the current state of the quadrotor. Current position and orientation of the quadrotor will be continuously updated and sent to each Unit. The expected outcomes of the project includes following points: - Autonomously perform trajectory control or path following control. - Navigate without GPS measurement. - Perform obstacle avoidance - Cooperate with other vehicles in a group of aerial vehicles and a group of autonomous vehicles (ground and underwater vehicles) - Perform a visual inspection task in a constrained area representative of space on an oil production platform.

AR.Drone quadrotor ver 2.0 model is employed to verify the performance of the proposed controller. Optitrack motion capture system is used to estimate the current position of the quadrotor. The system is built on ROS with ISLAB AR.Drone driver.

Initial Experiments of PID Trajectory Control of AR.Drone quadrotor ver 2.0 can be located at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=70ZGHbS5rMY

REALTIME EXPERIMENT

CONCLUSIONS

The poster has presented the potential applications of quadrotor (telepresence technologies) into offshore platform operations. The methods to verify the performance of the proposed controller are demonstrated in simulation and realtime experiment.

REFERENCES

[1] “FAA Approves Use of Drones By ConocoPhillips To Monitor Oil Drilling Activities In Alaska”, Ryan Koronowski, ThinkProgress, thinkprogress.org, August 26 2013. [2] “Commercial Drones Could Have 'Endless' Uses Under Canada 's Laws”, Evan Mitsui, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), www.cbc.ca, July 15 2013. [3] Alistair Barr and Elizabeth Weise, "Underground Drone Economy Takes Flight", USA TODAY, http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2013/12/02/, underground-drone-economy/3805387/, December 2 2013.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work is supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), C-CORE J. I. Clark Chair, Memorial University of Newfoundland (MUN) and RDC Ocean Industries Student Research Awards (5404-1774-101).

Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, NL, Canada, A1B 3X5

Trung Nguyen, George K. I. Mann, Andrew Vardy, Raymond G. Gosine

Advanced Control System Design of Quadrotor Aerial Vehicle from Geometric Viewpoint

Simulation is conducted on V-Rep and Robot Operating System (ROS) in order to illustrate quadrotor applications on the offshore platform. The simulation includes: 1. Quadrotor Surveillance 2. Chimney Inspection 3. Under-deck Inspection 4. Response in case of Emergency

The video of the demonstration can be located at www.youtube.com/watch?v=FkeR-j_vpTY

SIMULATION

Figure 3: The advanced control system of quadrotor

The project advances control system technology for applications of a quadrotor aerial vehicle in order to perform visual inspections in constrained areas on an offshore oil-and-gas platform. The objective of the project is to advance two main parts of the quadrotor's control system: navigation and controller. The project addresses the problems from a geometric viewpoint in order to overcome some assumptions of previous controller design, to enable greater manoeuvrability, and to facilitate the MAV working alone or a group of autonomous vehicles in indoor or GPS-denied environments.

Figure 1: Offshore platform in Newfoundland (heritage.nl.ca)

Figure 2: Asctec Pelican equipped with camera and laser (asctec.de)

Figure 4: Demonstration of quadrotor application on the offshore platform

Figure 5: Realtime experiment setup in EN1037, Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, MUN