Background

As UAVs become more widespread and versatile, their use and applications expand into areas that until now have been associated with other types of technology. In an attempt to promote the further development of unmanned aircraft, Innovation Fund Denmark (IFD) decided to support UAWORLD; a project in which RESEIWE teams up with GamesOnTrack, Sky-Watch and Aalborg University . IFD has partly funded this project with a grant of DKK 11 million. The objective of this three-year-long project is to develop drones for indoor flying without GPS that can be deployed in industrial settings. Some of the potential applications of this technology would encompass tasks related to the logistics and the quality control that manufacturing companies conduct on a regular basis in hard-to-reach areas. The service sector could also benefit from the utilization of drones with indoor-flying capabilities since they have the potential of streamlining the operations of enterprises in this economic sector.

Challenges

RESEIWE’s role in the project is to deliver and apply robust wireless communication systems and protocols that ensure the smooth and reliable operation of drones in buildings and factories, where concrete and steel create interference and deteriorate the quality of the wireless link. Besides these physical hindrances that hamper the remote controlling of UAVs indoors, the obstacle of high network latency represents another significant issue since a delay in the response time of the drones could have a negative impact on battery life. Maintaining the drones in the air as long as possible is imperative in industrial settings because the productivity of a whole factory could be at stake. Therefore, reducing the latency of the network has been a challenging task that has required a great deal of attention.

Our Solution

We have overcome the physical impediments related to flying indoors by modifying and reconfiguring the software that accompanies the chosen wireless chipsets in order to assemble transceivers that possess the necessary functions to cope with the dynamic environment found in buildings and industrial complexes. As a result, we can offer a version of our ReWiLink^TM technology that delivers reliable digital links that support indoor flying. On the other hand, we have dealt with the issue of reducing latency by means of the elimination of conventional buffers and the configuration of more efficient communication protocols that prevent the incidence of lags. Our participation in UAWORLD has also resulted in enhancements to our ReWiLink^TM technology, which now not only has the capability of maintaining a reliable digital link, but also offers the possibility of establishing a camera link over Ethernet. Consequently, these refinements represent customizing options that can be integrated into your unmanned aircraft, enabling it to carry out highly demanding tasks under indoor challenging conditions.