PRE2018 3 Group11

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1. Home
2. Organization
3. Brainstorm

Organization

The group composition, deliverables, milestones, planning and task division can be found on the organization page.

Brainstorm

To explore possible subjects for this project, a brainstorm session was held. Out of the various ideas, the Follow-Me Drone was chosen to be our subject of focus.

Problem Statement

The ability to navigate around one’s environment is taken for granted by most humans and often not seen as a difficult or complex task. And this statement does not even necessarily have to concern complex orientation challenges in an unknown environment, but much simpler: Just the ability to read a map and follow a route. Similarly, the skill to remember how to get to one’s favourite cafe. These kind of tasks require complex activities in our brains, which causes the very broad skill of ‘navigation’ to be present in humans in very diverse skill levels. People who’s navigation skills fall on the lower end of the scale, do seem to be slightly troubled in their everyday life - it might take them substantially longer than others to be able to find their way to work just by remembering the route or they might get lost in new environments every now and then. However, it is important to note, that this is a dynamic grey-scale; there is no line between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ navigation.

Since navigation skills can be traced back to certain distinct cognitive processes (however, to a limited extent, as the field of neurosciences is still to be developed further [1]), this means that a lesion in specific brain regions can cause a human’s navigational abilities to decrease dramatically. This was found in certain case studies with patients that were subject to brain damage, and labeled “Topographical Disorientation” (TD), which can affect a very broad range of navigation tasks [2]. Within the last decade, cases started to show up, in which people showed similar symptoms to patients with TD, however, they did not suffer any brain damage and were normally functioning in all other aspects. This disorder was termed “Developmental Topographical Disorientation” (DTD) [3], which, as was recently discovered, might affect 1-2% of the world's population (it is important to note that this is an estimate based on studies and surveys) [4].

Many of the affected people can not rely on map-based navigation and even sometimes get lost on everyday routes. To make those people’s everyday life easier, one idea is to use a drone. The idea of the playfully-named “follow-me drone” is simple: By flying in front of its user, accurately guiding them to a desired location, the drone takes over the majority of a human’s cognitive wayfinding tasks.This makes it easy and safe for people to find their destination with minimized distraction and cognitive workload of navigation tasks.

User

We have two classes of users: people afflicted with the aforementioned DTD, and general users. In the first class, the drone is meant to accompany the user and be more personalized to his/her routes and routines and might even incorporate an extended set of custom peripheral features. In the second class, the drone is meant to serve a more general public that are visiting a certain area, such as a university campus, and provide services specific to that area.

Society

The societal aspect of the follow-me drones regards the moral standpoint of cognitively impaired people in front of society. Since impairments should not create insuperable barriers in the daily life of affected people, it can be seen as a service to society as a whole, to create solutions which make it easier to live - even if that solution only helps a small percentage of the world's population.

Enterprise

Since this solution is unique in its concept and specifically aimed at a certain user group, a production of the drone could potentially lead to profit. However, the focus should always stay on providing the best possible service to the end-users. User-centered design is a key to this development.

Approach

In order to get to a feasible design solution, we will do research on following fields:

• Topographical Disorientation disorder. We will be answering following questions:
  • Which daily-life tasks are affected by Topographical Disorientation?
  • How many people are affected by Topographical Disorientation?
  • How does one reach the people suffering from Topographical Disorientation?
• Human interaction. We will be answering following questions:
  • What is the optimal height and distance for the drone to be away from the user? Here we will also consider operation indoors in e.g. a university building and outdoors e.g. in traffic.
  • How will the drone communicate with the user (e.g. when the user should turn left or right / when the battery is low)?
  • How will the user recognize their drone if there are multiple drones?
• Non-technical aspects of drones.
  • What is the legal status of drones in The Netherlands?
• Technical aspects of drones. We will be answering following questions:
  • How does the drone fly?
  • How can we ensure that the drone can operate long enough?
    • How much electricity does it take to fly?
    • What is the current state of the art w.r.t. battery capacity for batteries that can be used in drones?
  • What are possible charging techniques?
  • Will the drone operate in extreme weather conditions? If so, how?
• Software aspects of drones. We will be answering following questions:
  • How will the drone navigate from point A to B?
    • Which pathfinding technique is the best one to be used?
    • How will the drone avoid obstacles in its path?
    • How will the drone account for live changes (e.g. in traffic)?
  • How can the drone keep an appropriate distance from the user, while remaining visible at all times?

After finding an answer to these questions, we will have a basis for our design, and can rapidly create it, while documenting our decisions.

As for the simulation, we will do the following:

• Research on which software to use.
• Implementation of the simulation.

Solution

Here we discuss our solution. If it exists of multiple types of sub-problems that we defined in the problem statement section, then use separate sections (placeholders for now).

Legal Issues

In this project eventually a flying drone is designed that is supposed to move autonomously through the street to guide a person to their destination. It is important however to first look at possible legal issues that come with that. In the Netherlands the rules about drones are not yet formulated in a clear way. What does become apparent from the sources from ‘Rijksoverheid’ is that you are not allowed to pilot recreational drones above masses of people or roads and near buildings [Rijksoverheid, Regels voor recreatief gebruik drone, link] . This is a pretty big issue as the drone in this project will definitely have to fly through residential areas. However it does not entirely become clear whether the rules for recreational use or use for business apply to this project if any at all. The drone is not really intended for recreational use. The users really need the drone in order to find their way around. But one of the requirements to fall under business use is that the drone is used by a company to make money [Rijksoverheid, Regels voor zakelijk gebruik drone, link]. This does not include selling it to users. In that case it is in the users ownership and can no longer be said to use by the company. If the drone is rented however it still might fall under business use. However it does not become entirely clear which might be due to the fact that drones are quite a novel idea and rules still have to be adapted for them to be integrated in society.

If the drone falls under the business category several licenses are required [Rijksoverheid, Welke vergunning heb ik nodig voor mijn drone, link]. First of all the drone needs to have a certificate of airworthiness. Secondly the company using the drone should have a RPAS Operator Certificate. And lastly it is stated that the pilot should have a drone pilot’s license.

This last item is kind of an issue. All rules about drones are based on the idea that the drones have pilots. This is true for most existing drones but in this project the drone is supposed to fly autonomously. No real rules exist about this since this again is such a new technology.

So right now drones are not allowed in residential areas but that does not mean researching this idea is completely useless. In this project only a first design will be made for the drone. A few years might go by before development is far enough to be used in practice. Legislation is continuously subject to changes in new areas of technologies so if the need for drones like in this project is demonstrated and safety can be guaranteed, use of drones for this purpose might be legalized by the time the first real drones are built and used.

Placeholder Partial Solution 2

Placeholder Partial Solution 3

Simulation

Conclusion