Autonomous Quadcopter Teams in Search and Rescue Applications

Abstract

Teams of commercial Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, or UAVs, have a high potential to assist in many applications where humans otherwise would have di culty, such as in search and rescue operations. This thesis works to establish the practical basis for building such a functional team of quadcopters, creating the systems needed for communication, localization, and sensor mapping. Localization accuracies of within 5cm are achieved, as are significant reductions in cost to build the system. While a fully integrated system was not completed due to wireless communication issues, indi- vidual systems were all built and tested, and search and rescue times were decreased by 2.5 fold using a team of UAVs as opposed to just an individual UAV.