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How drones fuel ‘smart air’: air control and congestion

While the developments in the use of drones are going very fast, most of its use is still in an experimenting phase. Besides, the technique is working on an individual basis. From start-ups to big companies like Google, Amazon and UPS. Companies are experimenting by delivering pizzas on the beach. In the future, when drones have become widely adapted, a new form of air control must be developed. In crowded areas in particular. When drones might take up from anyplace and land anywhere anytime, air control is far more difficult than control of normal airplanes. And of course, delivery drones are supposed to work without human interference, even beyond sight from the owner of these drones.

Communication

Drones need to communicate with each other, and with other participants of air traffic. Furthermore, questions about prevention from flying over fires and forbidden areas must be solved. For instance airports, strategic points as driveways and military zones. Taking in consideration they might fly of its course due to wind.

Congestion

When pizza delivery will be just as common as delivery by scooter nowadays, a form of air congestion is going to take place as well. Companies are already proposing to use different ‘airlines’ for speedy delivery and slower registering traffic. But then, there must come a solution how to handle the event when delivery drones are in each other environment without colliding. Or to prevent that the whole traffic gets stuck because every device is waiting on other drones.

The ‘congestion’ takes also place in the use of frequencies. Drones use the same frequencies as a lot of other uses. For instance, airlines and military.

Standardization and legislation

That means standardization and legislation is needed. Standardization, to make certain that drones from different users/companies can communicate with each other. And to make decisions to fly safely and as efficiently as possible. Like other kinds of traffic, legislation is needed to set some rules how all devices can participate in drone traffic and traffic in general. And, when industry won’t be able to solve the already issues mentioned on trust and acceptability, legislation might also come in to set restrictions in the use of drones.

Final Thoughts

The application possibilities of drones are very promising for delivery and registration uses. It is still in its experimental phase. But with developments going fast, soon it will reach the maturity phase. For this, there are two-fold kind of challenges.

One of these are challenges on privacy, safety and security. These challenges have to be solved before their use will get widespread trust and acceptance. Besides, there are technical and communication issues: where multiple drones are being used – especially in cities- challenges how drones can and have to behave in traffic has to be solved.

In both challenges, sensors play a pivotal role in solving the technical questions. Find out more about Drones and DC motor Control

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How drones fuel ‘smart air’: The eye in the sky

Besides delivery, drones are already used as an ‘eye in the sky’. Or, with a ultrawide band radar attached to the drone, you can fly the drone wherever you want, maybe land the drone and start measuring. For instance:

  • It helps farmer to get higher yields by giving them a literal overview which spots on their field are developing well and which spots are perfoming less. So that farmers can take action on the lower performing spots.
  • Drones have excellent use for finding spots for roads, waterworks, energy fields and other infrastructure.
  • Drones give a real-time situation overview. As an example: an overview of road congestion to aid the city council to take proper action
  • They can measure while covering large areas. For instance: a large crop field where only the first crops from the road are visible for a farmer. Furthermore, they have the advantage that big areas can be captured in one glance
  • At places where humans have difficulty or is dangerous to reach. Think about places in the jungle or large mountainous regions. But also: an aid in building and maintenance of buildings and constructions like large building sites, bridges and high towers. Or when action on dangerous gasses is needed. And maybe, drones can become an aid to perform reparations and make installations themselves
  • For better and worse, drones can also be used for guarding assets. With sensors, they can guard areas by looking for movement, and establish a protected zone. Unfortunately, the technology is also available for terrorists, who will also find a use for drones for maximising chaos

Privacy, Safety and Security

Especially in crowded areas, privacy is a big issuse. A big complaint is the noise that drones produce: in a 2017 study, NASA found out that people find the noise of drones more annoying than the sound of ‘normal’ traffic. Besides noise, privacy has another factor: the camera. Besides that, drones may fly unasked over your property, what do they register exactly? What if you don’t want to be filmed in your garden?

Another practical problem is the risk that a drone can drop its cargo. Or that it can fall out of air itself. Amazon is already experimenting with a self-destroying drone when the drone risks crashing. In crowded areas, the risk of damage or even worse: hitting someone can’t be overlooked.

For acceptance of the use of drones, these challenges have to be resolved for getting trust and acceptance. Legislation is expected to come in to regulate drone traffic.

Security

As anyone can and will buy a drone, security is another issue. Anyone can just buy one online or even in a toystore and fly with it anywhere they want. The annoying noise of a drone in natural parks might be a inconvenience. But of course, more harmful use of drones might take place as well, for instance when used by terrorists, who can use drones for unwanted inspection and creating chaos. But also: you can load anything on your drone, fly to your destination and place it into action. Governments can forbid the flying of drones in the proximity of (for instance) a nuclear powerplant, but how do you prevent someone actually flying it there? Where a lot of questions of drone-flying have some potential answers, this one is still unsolved.

In all cases, sensors play a pivotal role in solving the technical questions. ASN Filter Designer can help with sensor measurement with real-time feedback and the powerful signal analyzer. How? Look at ASN Filter Designer or mail our consultancy service at: designs@advsolned.com

Do you agree with this list? Do you have other suggestions? Please let us know!

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How drones fuel ‘smart air’: Delivery drones

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Where ‘smart traffic’ has already 417 billion hits on google, I only found ‘smart air’ for a kind of door lock and ‘smart drone’ for an advanced toy drone. But definitely, drones are so hot that they will become part of something called ‘smart air’. The SESAR project predicts that drones will make 250 billion hours of flight in the European Union alone. For comparison: this is far more than the air traffic of ‘normal’ airplanes today.

Because drones are using many sensors, we did some research how the use of drones can grow to maturity and fuel ‘smart air’. Today we talk about challenges for delivery drones.

Delivery drones

No wonder, drones have proven to be very convenient already and have even more promises in store. Soon, it will be commonplace that drones are delivering packages, from hot pizzas to even more urgent medicines. And even humans: the first drone taxis are already being tested. At this moment, drones are already used for drag-and-drop deliveries in some rural and faraway areas. Most articles on the internet talk about the use in drones in big city areas. And there they have the big advantage of an -still- almost empty sky instead of congested roads and overfull parking places. For that, delivery by drones will be faster and more predictable.

But until use of drones are entirely tried and tested, most drone developments will take place on rural environments. Because here the risk of large damage is a lot smaller when something will go wrong. In time, delivery drones will still be used in rural places. Maybe as a standalone, maybe in combination with self-driving trucks. Reach will not be a big problem, since the whole word is getting connected fast. So, reach will almost only depend on battery endurance. And for now, these batteries have only a limited capacity for distance and cargo.

Challenges while travelling

Like all delivery services, drone delivery has to a pick-up a package, travel to the destination and drop-of the package.  While travelling, drones have to know how to reach their destination. Meanwhile, there are some challenges:

  • Risk of colliding, with other drones, birds and other air users. Just like other traffic
  • And at point in time, some traffic rules have to be set in place. Sensors can help to let the drone follow these rules
  • How drones can stay on course, even with wind
  • Preventing drones to cross over forbidden (known) areas and unexpected ‘wrong’ areas (e.g. a building or a wood on fire)
  • How to prevent a package from falling? How to alert that a package will probably fall? Or maybe the drone itself? If so, measurement can be taken. Already, there are experiments with self-destruction. But maybe more practical solutions can be found to let the drone aim for a ‘safe area’, such as a park, river, etc. for an ‘emergency landing’
  • Acceptance of drones beside safety: how to guarentee privacy when drones are flying over peopled areas? Then there is the issue of noise: research shows that people find the noise of drones one of the most annoying forms of noise

Challenges with dropping the cargo

For now, the drop-of is literally done by dropping-of the cargo. Maybe with the aid of a cord which places the package as soft as possible to the ground. But anyhow: the drone stays in the air. So, technology has to get safe: for the package to be delivered undamaged. How does the drone know that the right person gets the package? And we have to prevent dogs from biting the package. And of course, to prevent that the dropped cargo will harm humans, animals or buildings or even worse.

The use of sensors

The application possibilities of drones are very promising for delivery uses. It is still in its experimental phase. But with developments going fast, soon it will reach the maturity phase. For this, there are two-fold kind of challenges.

Some are challenges on privacy, safety and security. These challenges have to be solved before the use of drones will get widespread trust and acceptance. The other are technical and communication issues: where multiple drones are being used – especially in cities- challenges how drones can and have to behave in traffic has to be solved.

In both challenges, sensors play a pivotal role in solving the technical questions. In all cases, ASN Filter Designer can help with sensor measurement with real-time feedback and the powerful signal analyzer. How? Look at ASN Filter Designer or mail ASN consultancy: designs@advsolned.com

Do you agree with this list? Do you have other suggestions? Please let us know!

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How sensor measurement can improve the performance of drones

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Until now, the professional use of drones is mostly still in an experimenting stage. However, drones are one of the golden nuggets in IoT because they can play a pivotal role, for instance in congested cities and faraway areas for delivery. Further, they can be a great help to give an overview of a large area or for places which are difficult or dangerous to reach.

In one of our previous blogs, we concluded that sensor measurement has mostly been a case of trial and error. In this blog, we list some of the challenges we see for sensor measurement which has to be solved to bring the professional use of drones to full maturity.

Practical challenges which can and must be solved with sensors

Here are some of the challenges we have found:

  • Risk of colliding, with other drones, birds and other air users. Just like other traffic
  • And at point in time, some traffic rules have to be set in place. Sensors can help to let the drone follow these rules
  • How drones can stay on course, even with wind
  • Preventing drones to cross over forbidden (known) areas and unexpected ‘wrong’ areas (e.g. a building or a wood on fire)
  • Challenges with unloading the package:
    • Without damage
    • Without harming people, animals, buildings
    • How the drone will know that the right person gets the package? Can we prevent dogs from biting the package?
  • How to prevent a package from falling? How to alert that a package will probably fall? Or maybe the drone itself? If so, measurement can be taken. Already, there are experiments with self-destruction. But maybe more practical solutions can be found to let the drone aim for a ‘safe area’, such as a park, river, etc. for an ‘emergency landing’.

In all cases, ASN Filter Designer can help with sensor measurement with real-time feedback and the powerful signal analyser? How? Look at ASN Filter Designer or mail us: info@advsolned.com

Do you agree with this list? Do you have other suggestions? Please let us know!

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Drones and DC motor control

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Drones and DC motor control – How the ASN Filter Designer can save you a lot of time and effort

Drones are one of the golden nuggets in IoT. No wonder, they can play a pivotal role in congested cities and far away areas for delivery. Further, they can be a great help to give an overview of a large area or places which are difficult or dangerous to reach. However, most of the technology is still in its experimental stage.

Because drones have a lot of sensors, Advanced Solutions Nederland did some research on how drone producing companies have solved questions regarding their sensor technology, especially regarding DC motor control.

Until now: solutions developed with great difficulty

We found out that most producers spend weeks or even months on finding solutions for their sensor technology challenges. With the ASN Filter Designer, he/she could have come to a solution within days or maybe even hours. Besides, we expect that the measurement would be better too.

The biggest time coster is that until now algorithms were developed by handwork, i.e. they were developed in a lab environment and then tested in real-life. With the result of the test, the algorithm would be tweaked again until the desired results were reached. However, yet another challenge stems from the fact that a lab environment is where testing conditions are stable, so it’s very hard to make models work in real life. These steps result in rounds and rounds of ‘lab development’ and ‘real life testing’ in order to make any progress -which isn’t ideal!

How the ASN Filter Designer can help save a lot of time and effort

The ASN Filter Designer can help a lot of time in the design and testing of algorithms in the following ways:

  • Design, analyse and implement filters for drone sensor applications with real-time feedback and our powerful signal analyser.
  • Design filters for speed and positioning control for sensorless BLDC (brushless DC) motor applications.
  • Speed up deployment to Arm Cortex-M embedded processors.

 

Real-time feedback and powerful signal analyser

One of the key benefits of the ASN Filter Designer and signal analyser is that it gives real-time feedback. Once an algorithm is developed, it can easily be tested on real-life data. To analyse the real-life data, the ASN Filter Designer has a powerful signal analyser in place.

Design and analyse filters the easy way

You can easily design, analyse and implement filters for a variety of drone sensor applications, including: loadcells, strain gauges, torque, pressure, temperature, vibration, and ultrasonic sensors and assess their dynamic performance in real-time for a variety of input conditions.  With the ASN Filter Designer, you don’t have do to any coding yourself or break your head with specifications: you just have to draw the filter magnitude specification and the tool will calculate the coefficients itself.

Speed up deployment

Perform detailed time/frequency analysis on captured test datasets and fine-tune your design. Our Arm CMSIS-DSP and C/C++ code generators and software frameworks speed up deployment to a DSP, FPGA or micro-controller.

An example: designing BLDC motor control algorithms

BLDC (brushless DC) BLDC motors have found use in a variety of application areas, including: robotics, drones and cars. They have significant advantages over brushed DC motors and induction motors, such as: better speed-torque characteristics, high reliability, longer operating life, noiseless operation, and reduction of electromagnetic interference (EMI).

One advantage of BLDC motor control compared to standard DC motors is that the motor’s speed can be controlled very accurately using six-step commutation, making it a good choice for precision motion applications, such as robotics and drones.

Sensorless back-EMF and digital filtering

For most applications, monitoring of the back-EMF (back-electromotive force) signal of the unexcited phase winding is easier said than done, since it has significant noise distortion from PWM (pulse width modulation) commutation from the other energised windings. The  coupling  between  the  motor parameters, especially inductances, can induce ripple in the back-EMF signal that is synchronous with the PWM commutation.  As a consequence, this induced ripple on the back EMF signal leads to faulty commutation. Thus, the measurement challenge is how to accurately measure the zero-crossings of the back-EMF signal in the presence of PWM signals?

A standard solution is to use digital filtering, i.e. IIR, FIR or even a median (majority) filter. However, the challenge for most designers is how to find the best filter type and optimal filter specification for the motor under consideration.

The solution

The ASN Filter Designer allows engineers to work on speed and position sensorless BLDC motor control applications based on back-EMF filtering to easily experiment and see the filtering results on captured test datasets in real-time for various IIR, FIR and median (majority filtering) digital filtering schemes. The tool’s signal analyser implements a robust zero-crossings detector, allowing engineers to evaluate and fine-tune a complete sensorless BLDC control algorithm quickly and simply.

So, if you have a measurement problem, ask yourself:

Can I save time and money, and reduce the headache of design and implementation with an investment in new tooling?

Our licensing solutions start from just 125 EUR for a 3-month licence.

Find out what we can do for you, and learn more by visiting the ASN Filter Designer’s product homepage.

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