Disaster Relief Drone Network

2022 COE Engineering Design Project (MJ07)

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Faculty Lab Coordinator

Muhammad Jaseemuddin

Topic Category

Distributed Systems and Networking

Preamble

In a disaster struck area, communication breakdown is one of the major challenges in providing relief operation. In Japan, earthquake on 9.0 Richter scale and ensuing Tsunami caused breakdown of 6,700 base-station component and 65,000 telephone poles. The disruption or complete meltdown on communication infrastructure hampers relief effort. The restoration of communication requires ad hoc deployment of wireless base-stations and their configuration for that environment. Whether base-station carried on trucks or deployed airborne on-board drone come with their own cost and challenges.

Objective

In this project, you will design and implement a disaster relief network using WiFi and Drone communication technologies. You need to design auto-configuration of the network to allow fast and automatic deployment with minimal human intervention. The auto-configuration includes node discovery, bootstrapping and location tracking of base-stations. You need to design and implement Drone control algorithm to minimize coverage gap. Further, you need to design deployment and localization schemes. You can make the project more interesting by adding sensor nodes connected to those base-stations. In your design, First responder team can use smart Phones to exchange information through the communication infrastructure search and rescue effort.

Partial Specifications

• Low power Linux board capable of operating in different power saving modes or raspberry pi WiFi nodes as base stations.
• Few sensor boards (optional)
• Smart phone
• Drone (recommended)

Suggested Approach

• Use drone to serve as a mobile base station (the drone from Ryerson Library Collaboratory can be used)
• Use DJI drone developer SDK
• Evaluate Raspberry Pi as base-stations.
• Use IoT sensors.
• Set up auto-configuration, localization, and ad hoc routing system that can support emergency data
• Evaluate smart phone for remote monitoring and control

Group Responsibilities

• All students will be involved in the initial design phase.
• All students will be involved in integration and performance monitoring.
• All students will be involved in demo set up using some interesting applications.

Student A Responsibilities

• Lead the auto-configuration design.
• Selection of sensors.
• Design sensor interface and integrate with the sensor boards.
• Lead the demo design.

Student B Responsibilities

• Lead the first responder application design.
• Lead the control hardware and software design.
• Design the controller interface with the sensor board.
• Lead the demo set up.

Student C Responsibilities

• Lead localization, sensor interfacing, and system integration.
• Lead the interface and transmission through Drone relief network.
• Lead the implementation of the control and monitoring software on remote smart phones.

Student D Responsibilities

• Lead the design of drone deployment and control algorithm.
• Design and execute test procedures for the drone
• Contribute to the client application implementation

Course Co-requisites

COE768 and COE718 (recommended)

To ALL EDP Students

Due to COVID-19 pandemic, in the event University is not open for in-class/in-lab activities during the Winter term, your EDP topic specifications, requirements, implementations, and assessment methods will be adjusted by your FLCs at their discretion.