Autonomous at a distance: UASTW team with quadcopter demonstration at Infineon in Graz

In the Embedded Systems competence field, the UAS Technikum Wien has been working for four years on safety aspects in the field of indoor navigation for the so-called “new aviation”. In this context, the head of the competence field Roman Beneder, together with his colleagues Patrick Schmitt and Clemens Környefalvy, developed a showcase in which a quadcopter can recognise objects via the integrated sensor technology and on the basis of neuronal networks and independently maintain a preset safety distance.

For this purpose, the copter has a so-called environmental sensor module on the front, consisting of a stereo camera, a time-of-flight camera and a radar sensor (ToF camera and radar sensor from Infineon). This module is connected to an Nvidia Jetson Nano Developer Kit on the aircraft. The copter executes object detection and object classification algorithms during the flight, which provide coordinates of persons located in the environment.

The object detection and classification are based on neural networks. The data is sent from the built-in Nvidia computer to an Aurix TC375 (Infineon multicore microcontroller), which in turn verifies the information in a triple-modular redundancy system and forwards it to the Pixhawk flight controller. This processes the position data of the objects and can independently ensure that the distance to an object does not fall below a preset value. This automatically prevents quadcopters, for example, from coming into contact with other objects.

In the course of the industry cooperation Emerging Applications Lab (EAL), the team of the competence field is working together with the semiconductor manufacturer Infineon on selected topics of the EU project ADACORSA (however, the FHTW is not a direct project partner).  As part of the General Assembly project meeting, the project team was a guest at Infineon in Graz and presented the showcase to an expert audience – a total of around 70 visitors – from the field of autonomous drones.

The UAS Technikum Wien was also invited to Infineon in Graz as part of the Long Night of Research and presented the showcase with the quadcopter to the general public. The team was pleased to welcome 530 visitors. The station with the flying drone was very busy and active from 17:00 to almost 23:00.