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Students will gain both theoretical knowledge and practical skills in the building, testing and safe operation of aerial robotic systems. To provide relevance to real-world practice, an emphasis will be placed on relating foundational skills and theory such as evaluating different types of flight dynamics, sensing & control schemes, communication interfaces and avionic approaches against their utility within real-world application scenarios. Students will also gain practical flight time experience and an understanding of the necessary operational flight procedures needed for setting up outdoor experiments that comply with current CAA (Civil Aviation Authority) regulations. This includes understanding how to set up flight procedures to support advanced operations such as flying beyond-line-of-sight (BLOS) and performing autonomous aerial manoeuvres safely through a set of group indoor and outdoor fieldwork challenges.

Aims:

The aims of this module are to:

• Develop students’ confidence in core design, fabrication, programming, testing and problem-solving skills.
• Provide students with the skills to learn the necessary considerations to setting up outdoor aerial operations safely.
• Engaging students with practice, and how to use a systems approach in matching engineering requirements when building aerial robotic systems to address the real-world operational, ethical and legal aspects.

Intended learning outcomes:

On successful completion of this module, a student will be able to:

1. Safely operate different classes of drone platforms for indoor and outdoor uses.
2. Demonstrate critical thinking of the mechanical, electronic and computational engineering challenges related to designing different of drone systems.
3. Conduct research experiments suitable for assessing the performance and impact of aerial robotic systems.
4. Manufacture and programme different types of aerial robotic platforms.
5. Articulate the policy, ethical and legal regulations in the use of aerial robotic systems indoors and outdoors.
6. Assess the engineering requirements needed to meet a range of real-world applied challenges.

Indicative content:

The following are indicative of the topics the module will typically cover:

• Kinematics, dynamics and modelling approaches for aerial robotic systems.
• Sensors, actuators and control design for performance (payload and power) constrained systems.
• Aerodynamics, flight mechanics, propulsion, stability and handling qualities.
• Analysis, simulation and experimental methodologies.
• Networking, communication and human-robot interfaces for controlling aerial systems.
• Application of autonomy, 3D perception, path planning, motion planning and machine learning methods for multi-terrain aerial systems.
• CAA rules, drone rules, governing laws, drone operational procedures.
• Ethics of aerial robotic design and environmental impact.
• Aerial robots and their application in the environment, economy and society.

Requisite conditions:

To be eligible to select this module as optional or elective, a student must be registered on a programme and year of study for which it is formally available.