A decade or two ago, situational awareness may have been hampered by a limited supply of aerial surveillance data. In an effort to counter this problem, militaries and agencies around the world have procured and deployed UAVs at an astonishing rate. These systems have been used in a wide range of applications, ranging from border patrol and combat, to monitoring wild fires and supporting search and rescue operations, just to name a few. However, the solution to last decade's lack of data has brought about a new problem: a lack of manpower and resources to process the overabundance of data at a sufficient speed. The C-DUS Lab is helping address this emerging problem by developing an outdoor autonomous aerial platform capable of using an on-board video camera to track a moving ground target in real time.Drone quad-rotor has been selected to serve as the initial development platform. The quad-rotor was chosen in order to decouple the vehicle dynamics from the video processing and path-planning algorithms.

An on-board Gumstix Overo COM and a RoboVero expansion board will provide video processing and autonomous flight capabilities, respectively. Currently, the on-board sensor suite includes a 9-DOF IMU, ultrasonic and IR range sensors, and a CMOS Gumstix Caspa camera with 752 × 480 pixel resolution. Initially, the video processing and path planning algorithms may be executed either on-board or off-board, while the long term goal is to run all on-board. Development of the algorithms will focus primarily on tracking vehicular targets in outdoor environments. Future work will focus on adapting the algorithms to operate on board a fixed-wing aircraft. The lab intends to field a fixed-wing system by October 2012 at the 1st annual UAS Video Tracking Challenge at Texas A&M University.Drone from Parrot is a four-rotor helicopter that you control with your iPhone or iPod TouchNew from electronics maker Parrot comes the AR.Drone, a Wi-Fi helicopter with dual cameras and augmented-reality video streaming, that you control using your iPhone or iPod Touch.

Although the RC flyer is still in the prototype stage, Parrot has been demonstrating it at the 2010 CES show in Las Vegas. Drone features four rotors and interchangeable hulls for flying both indoors and outside. Built-in flight stabilization technology keeps the drone steady while you use your iPhone’s motion sensors to steer it remotely over the craft’s Wi-Fi network.Drone looks familiar, it may remind you of the CyberQuad unmanned aerial vehicle we covered in December. Unlike the CyberQuad, the AR.Drone is meant for consumer use. Weighing about 400g (0.9lbs) the drone features a carbon-fiber frame and Styrofoam hulls for light weight and resiliency against bumps. The smaller hull is intended for outdoor use, while the larger hull includes rotor guards for use when flying indoors. Parrot says the onboard Lithium-ion batteries provide enough power for 15 minutes of flying time.Although Parrot has previously been known for their wireless speaker systems, they spent four years developing the AR.

Drone with an eye to creating an augmented reality gaming platform. Using its forward facing streaming video camera, the AR.Drone onboard image processing can detect other drones or 3D targets. You can then fire virtual rockets or lasers at the target for simulated battles. Several demo games are on display, but Parrot hopes that game developers will take advantage of their open API to develop more games and other applications for the AR.parrot ar drone nlDrone.To make the AR.parrot ar drone frequencyDrone easy to fly, Parrot developed a microelectromechanical (MEMS) inertial guidance system that includes a three-axis accelerometer, a two-axis gyroscope, and a single-axis precision gyroscope for yaw. parrot drone 2 payload

The flyer also includes an ultrasonic altimeter and a down-facing video camera for calculating speed and position. These elements combine to allow the AR.Drone to compensate for windy conditions, and even to hover unattended. Piloting the drone is accomplished by tilting your iPhone or iPod Touch. The remote control connection is established through the AR.Drone’s built-in Wi-Fi network, and the unit’s forward-facing video camera streams its feed directly to the screen on your iPhone. ar drone parrot joystickIf you remove you finger from the iPhone, the AR.parrot ar drone propeller placementDrone’s autopilot keeps the drone hovering about a meter (3.3ft) off the ground. ar drone parrot apiIf the network connection is lost, the autopilot will stabilize the drone and slowly lower it to the ground for a soft landing.

Parrot hopes to make the AR.Drone available in the second half of 2010. There’s no word yet on pricing. Not everyone is thrilled with the rise of civilian drones in American skies. Last week, after Amazon hyped its plan to deliver packages in half an hour via UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle), we wondered about the drone backlash happening in many part of the U.S. And while an angry few threatened to shoot down these delivery drones, a more pressing concern seems to be: What if people try to hack them?Just last week, security researcher Samy Kamkar made news after announcing he had modified his Parrot AR.Drone quadcopter to hunt and hijack other drones. Employing simple hardware including a Raspberry Pi computer and a wireless transmitter, plus software tools such as aircrack-ng and Kamkar's own Skyjack, the pirate drone scans for nearby Parrot IP addresses. If it locates one, the drone will then hack the unencrypted Wi-Fi controls of its target and place the bot under Kamkar's control.Kamkar says he designed Skyjack to "get people to pay a little attention to the potential security implications of drones flying around and becoming more ubiquitous in daily use."

Patrick Egan, drone advocate and editor of sUAS News, is not especially worried about Skyjack. Hackers can target Parrot drones, yes, but that's because those French recreational quadcopters run on Wi-Fi, not on radio frequencies. "The Parrot is something a father and [child] would play with in the yard."Kamkar readily admits that there are limits to his hack. The Skyjack drone can stay in the air for only 10 minutes. Its strike range extends as far as its own Wi-Fi network, and it detects only those IP addresses associated with Parrot. But that's not the point. The drones that would be used for package delivery or other commercial uses in the future would be much harder to bring down, he says. But it's not impossible—and that's his point.For example, high-tech pirates could target the unmanned aerial vehicle's GPS navigation system by jamming weak satellite signals, says Todd Humphreys, an aerospace engineering professor at University of Texas at Austin. "You can just get on the Internet and buy a so-called personal privacy device, and you can jam GPS receivers from about 10 meters to up to a mile away," Humphreys says.

The more heavy-duty jammers cost only a few hundred dollars.A drone with disrupted GPS navigation would be in trouble. In the best-case scenario, the vehicle could limp home by relying on its inertial measurement unit to provide a basic dead reckoning. A human operator could also help by remotely steering the drone with visual cues coming from onboard cameras.But things get really dicey if an attacker jammed the communication link with the ground operator. Indeed, some of the "personal privacy devices" Humphreys mentions sport multiple antennas and are powerful enough to disrupt cellphone signals—which is what an Amazon drone probably would use for flying beyond line of sight, he says.Even more insidious is spoofing GPS coordinates, whereby the drone is tricked into landing at (or crashing into) a location chosen by the attacker. "It is orders of magnitude more sophisticated, more complicated than jamming," Humphreys says, "but it has a bigger payoff in that the attack can go undetected."

The threat is not theoretical. In June 2012, Todd Humphreys and his research team spoofed and grounded an $80,000 drone during a demonstration for the Department of Homeland Security.For now, the threats are being addressed incrementally. Georgia Tech, for example, has been conducting studies into autonomous vision-based navigation, while the Los Alamos National Laboratory wants to make robot movement less predictable."The advantage of acting unpredictably is that people who might want to exploit the robot cannot as easily anticipate where the robot might go next," says Los Alamos National Laboratory research engineer David Mascarenas.Still, Humphreys is concerned about the proliferation of software-defined radios. Whereas GPS spoofing is still the purview of highly skilled ham radio operators, these new devices give computer hackers easy entrance into the field. One day, will teen hackers be able to just download a GPS spoofing program and hijack a drone as they would a computer?"That's my worst fear," he says.