Thesis (MScEng (Electrical and Electronic Engineering))--University of Stellenbosch, 2011. / This thesis describes the design and implementation of a video compression development board as a standalone embedded system. The board can capture images, encode them and stream out a video to a destination over a wireless link. This project was done to allow users to test and develop video compression encoders that are designed for UAV applications. The board was designed to use an ADSP-BF533 Blackfin DSP from Analog Devices with the purpose of encoding images, which were captured by a camera module and then streamed out a video through a WiFi module. Moreover, an FPGA that has an interface to a logic analyzer, the DSP, the camera and the WiFi module, was added to accommodate other future uses, and to allow for the debugging of the board. The board was tested by loading a H.264 BP/MP encoder from Analog Devices to the DSP, where the DSP was integrated with the camera and the WiFi module. The test was successful and the board was able to encode a 2 MegaPixel picture at about 2 frames per second with a data rate of 186 Kbps. However, as the frame rate was only 2 frames per second, the video was somewhat jerky. It was found that the encoding time is a system limitation and that it has to be improved in order to increase the frame rate. A proposed solution involves dividing the captured picture into smaller segments and encoding each segment in parallel. Thereafter, the segments can be packed and streamed out. Further performance issues about the proposed structure are presented in the thesis.

Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is an expanding interest in numerous industries for various applications. Increasing development of UAVs is happening worldwide, where various sensor attachments and functions are being added. The multi-function UAV can be used within areas where they have not been managed before. Because of their accessibility, cheap purchase, and easy-to-use, they replace expensive systems such as helicopters- and airplane-surveillance. UAV are also being applied into surveillance, combing object detection to video-surveillance and mobility to finding an object from the air without interfering with vehicles or humans ground. In this thesis, we solve the problem of using UAV on autonomous sites, finding an object and critical situation, support autonomous site operators with an extra safety layer from UAVs camera. After finding an object on such a site, uses GPS-coordinates from the UAV to see and place the detected object on the site onto a gridmap, leaving a coordinate-map to the operator to see where the objects are and see if the critical situation can occur. Directly under the object detection, reporting critical situations can be done because of safety-distance-circle leaving warnings if objects come to close to each other. However, the system itself only supports the operator with extra safety and warnings, leaving the operator with the choice of pressing emergency stop or not. Object detection uses You only look once (YOLO) as main object detection Neural Network (NN), mixed with edge-detection for gaining accuracy during bird-eye-views and motion-detection for supporting finding all object that is moving on-site, even if UAV cannot find all the objects on site. Result proofs that the UAV-surveillance on autonomous site is an excellent way to add extra safety on-site if the operator is out of focus or finding objects on-site before startup since the operator can fly the UAV around the site, leaving an extra-safety-layer of finding humans on-site before startup. Also, moving the UAV to a specific position, where extra safety is needed, informing the operator to limit autonomous vehicles speed around that area because of humans operation on site. The use of single object detection limits the effects but gathered object detection methods lead to a promising result while printing those objects onto a global positions system (GPS) map has proposed a new field to study. It leaves the operator with a viewable interface outside of object detection libraries.

Since many buildings in Canada were built prior to the advent of national and provincial energy codes and standards, quantifying building envelope thermal performance in existing buildings is an important step in identifying retrofit opportunities. Due to the lack of building codes or standards for existing buildings in Canada, development of a rapid and robust quantitative approach to evaluate and rank buildings for vertical envelope retrofits is required. Hence, this dissertation sought to develop quantitative approaches to evaluate existing building envelope thermal performance in Canada and beyond. Following current professional practices, in Chapter 1, a comprehensive study was conducted on 49 campus buildings at the University of Victoria (UVic) to evaluate potential energy savings from vertical envelope retrofits, and to further validate those savings through more detailed energy models and parametric analyses for a subset of buildings. To this end, the thermal performance of a building envelope was quantified based on its heat loss coefficient (UA), obtained from multiplying its surface area (A) by its thermal transmittance (U-value). Heat loss calculations were used as a metric to inform envelope rehabilitation prioritization, while considering other data such as age and physical condition in parallel. Archetype energy models for selected buildings were used to evaluate the impacts of envelope retrofits on energy and GHG savings. The outcomes of this study allowed the University to weigh the benefits of improved energy performance from envelope retrofits against associated capital cost expenditures. Also, the implemented methodology and studied parameters unveiled a new horizon in evaluating the thermal performance of existing building envelopes in Canada, where a building code for existing buildings has not yet been established. Considering the economic findings of the envelope retrofits studied, it was concluded that in the absence of an existing building energy code, the University would likely require additional incentives, such as higher utility costs, higher carbon taxes, or qualifying for utility incentive programs to justify improving existing building envelope performance on the basis of energy only. The strength of the proposed methodology in Chapter 1 was in its balance of effort and ultimate decision-making utility, where reasonable thermal bridging approximations based on simulation models for existing buildings can yield data accurate enough to inform a ranking exercise on a large breadth of subject buildings. However, since numerical models do not consider degradation of building materials, real moisture content, and errors associated with manufacturing and installation, actual building envelope thermal performance differs from 3D simulation models. To study this limitation, in-situ thermal assessments of building envelopes were performed to quantify their actual thermal performances. To this end, Chapters 2 to 4 of this dissertation attempted to determine the viability of an external infrared thermography (IRT) survey technique for quantification of heat losses through the opaque building envelope, and also explores its potential application in identifying and comparing sources of air leakage. The experiments were performed on wood-framed wall assemblies commonly used in Canada due to growing interest among designers, builders, and governments to encourage the use of wood as a building material. In these studies, (Chapter 2 to Chapter 4), thermal transmittances (U-values) of wall assemblies were estimated with external IRT and compared with 3D computer simulations. Furthermore, the impact of the accuracy of U-values estimated with IRT on the deviation of energy simulation outputs with metered data was examined. Finally, a novel relative quantitative infrared index (IRI) was proposed as a means to facilitate rapid evaluation and subsequent ranking of building envelope thermal performance. From the experiments in Chapters 2 & 3, it was found that the U-values obtained with IRT were comparable with simulated values suggesting IRT can be a reliable tool for estimating the thermal performance of wood-framed wall assemblies. Results also demonstrated that thermal imaging artefacts including nonlinear characteristics of infrared (IR) camera focal array, a.k.a. non-uniformity corrections (NUC) and vignetting could have a substantial influence on the accuracy of results, in particular energy model outputs. This limitation was resolved by introducing a practical approach where thermal images were taken from different incident angle. Overall, IRI was found to be a reliable metric for relative quantitative comparison of building envelope thermal performance regardless of boundary conditions. Moreover, outcomes of the IRT air leakage study in Chapter 4 indicated that combined qualitative and quantitative IRT approaches could potentially be implemented by practitioners to identify sources of air leakage and thermal bridges in buildings and compare their relative severity. Since blower door testing is gradually being introduced as a building code requirement to measure building envelope airtightness in an increasing number of Canadian jurisdictions, performing IRT simultaneously is potentially valuable exercise in this context. Ultimately, the methodologies outlined in Chapters 2 to 4 can help decision-makers to characterize building envelope retrofits from a performance perspective, and potentially serve as a basis for governments to develop policies to improve existing building energy performance. The methodologies in Chapters 2 to 4 prompted opportunities to utilize the emergent technology of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) equipped with an infrared camera for quick thermal assessments of building envelopes. The last chapter of this dissertation, Chapter 5, outlines advantages and limitations of aerial IRT (UAV-IRT) surveys compared to conventional stationary IRT. Furthermore, a set of best practices for UAV-IRT were presented to minimize dynamic measurement uncertainty. It was concluded that with the current IR camera technology, aerial surveys for quantitative thermal assessment of building envelope are not as accurate as with conventional infrared thermography; further investigations by manufacturers and researchers are recommended. / Graduate

Drones flying in squad formation while interconnected in an ad-hoc fashion are called Flying Ad hoc Networks (FANETs). These FANETs are gathering special interests in the networking community in their deployment for different vital missions. Such missions include rescue missions in case of disasters, monitoring and border control, animal monitoring, crowd monitoring and management, etc. The main problems researched with FANETs are typically inherited from what has been done for mobile ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) and Vehicular Ad-hoc Networks (VANETs) earlier. One of the major problems is routing and forwarding gathered data towards the member(i.e., the drone) closest to the sink or the member that gateways to the Internet to reach the sink. Clustering the FANET nodes (i.e., the drones) is found to be a good solution for this problem. The preeminent contributions of this thesis include a novel grinding technique of the geolocation where FANET is deployed to perform certain tasks, a grid-based mobility model for UAVs, and extending the EMASS algorithm so that it can adapt to our proposed grid-based system. The result proves our mobility model’s superiority over one of the most used mobility models, Random walk.

Submitted by MARCELA DO VALLE MACHADO (marcelavmachado@gmail.com) on 2018-04-22T02:22:02Z No. of bitstreams: 1 machado_mv_me_prud.pdf: 3915564 bytes, checksum: a8e42c5376b44043a216b005b6c1615a (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Claudia Adriana Spindola null (claudia@fct.unesp.br) on 2018-04-23T11:50:28Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 1 machado_mv_me_prud.pdf: 3915564 bytes, checksum: a8e42c5376b44043a216b005b6c1615a (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-04-23T11:50:28Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 machado_mv_me_prud.pdf: 3915564 bytes, checksum: a8e42c5376b44043a216b005b6c1615a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-02-23 / Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo (FAPESP) / Devido ao elevado custo de Sistemas de Varredura a LASER Aerotransportados (SVLA) e a miniaturização de sensores, sistemas de varredura a LASER (SVL) de menor peso e custo têm sido uma alternativa para estudos florestais. Aliado a estes sistemas, a crescente utilização de Veículos Aéreos Não Tripulados (VANT) possibilita a aquisição de dados com maior flexibilidade e rapidez, o que permite a utilização de SVL mais leves neste tipo de plataforma. Todavia, a integração e sincronização dos dispositivos do sistema demanda árduo trabalho de conexão eletrônica e computacional. Em casos que não seja possível realizar a sincronização eletrônica entre os dispositivos do sistema, uma alternativa é a sincronização por pósprocessamento, estabelecida por meio da relação entre os dados temporais obtidos com o LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) e com o GNSS (Global Navigation Sattelite Systems), durante a trajetória de voo do SVL embarcado em VANT. Para relacionar estes dados, são realizadas manobras de voo na forma senoidal durante a decolagem e pouso com o sistema, a fim de gerar pontos de máximos e mínimos. Com isso, os dados LASER e as posições da plataforma, coletados pelos dispositivos LASER e GNSS/IMU em sistemas de tempo diferentes, são relacionados por meio da diferença de distância e altura em função do tempo. Posteriormente, o tempo dos dados LASER é corrigido para tempo GPS, caracterizando a sincronização por pós-processamento, e refinado pelo Método dos Mínimos Quadrado. Desse modo, a nuvem de pontos pode então ser gerada. O controle de qualidade altimétrico utilizando pontos de apoio coletados em campo, apresentou uma acurácia de 11,6 cm. Para o controle planimétrico foi verificada uma acurácia de 45 cm para a componente E e 62 cm para a componente N. A partir das acurácias encontradas para a nuvem de pontos, conclui-se que a técnica de sincronização empregada é uma alternativa viável para relacionar dispositivos desacoplados de um SVL e que a acurácia centimétrica do sistema permite que este seja empregado em diversas aplicações, dentre as quais estão estimativa de altura de árvores. / Due to the high cost of Airborne LASER Scanning (ALS) and the miniaturization of sensors, low-cost and low-weight LASER systems have been an alternative for forestry studies. Together with these systems, the increasing use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) platforms, also low cost, enables the acquisition of data with greater flexibility and speed, which allows the use of low-weight SVL in this type of platform. However, the integration and synchronization of the devices of the system demands specialised work for electronic and computational connections. In cases where it is not possible to perform electronic synchronization between the devices of the system, an alternative is the post-processing synchronization, established through the relationship between the signals obtained with LIDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) and GNSS (Global Navigation Sattelite Systems), during the flight path of the SVL boarded in UAV. To relate these signals, flight maneuvers are performed in the a sinusoidal form shape during takeoff and landing with the system in order to obtain peaks of maximum and minimum. Thus, the LASER data and platform positions collected by the LASER and GNSS / IMU devices in different time systems are related by distance and height as a function of time. Subsequently, the LASER data time is corrected to match GPS time, characterizing the post-processing synchronization, and latter refined by the Least Square Method. In this way, the point cloud can then be generated. The quality control for altimetry, using control points collected in the field, achieved an obtained accuracy of 11.6 cm. The planimetric quality control achieve an accuracy of 45 cm the E component and 62 cm for the N component. From the accuracy achieved for the point cloud, it was concluded that the synchronization technique used is a viable alternative to relate decoupled devices of an ALS and that the centimetric accuracy of the system allows it to be used in several applications, such as tree height estimation. / FAPESP Proc. nº 2013/50426-4

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are emerging as enablers for supporting many applications and services, such as precision agriculture, search and rescue, temporary network deployment, coverage extension, and security. UAVs are being considered for integration into emerging wireless networks as aerial users, aerial relays (ARs), or aerial base stations (ABSs). This dissertation proposes employing UAVs to contribute to physical layer techniques that enhance the security performance of advanced wireless networks and services in terms of availability, resilience, and confidentiality. The focus is on securing terrestrial cellular communications against eavesdropping with a cellular-connected UAV that is dispatched as an AR or ABS. The research develops mathematical tools and applies machine learning algorithms to jointly optimize UAV trajectory and advanced communication parameters for improving the secrecy rate of wireless links, covering various communication scenarios: static and mobile users, single and multiple users, and single and multiple eavesdroppers with and without knowledge of the location of attackers and their channel state information. The analysis is based on established air-to-ground and air-to-air channel models for single and multiple antenna systems while taking into consideration the limited on-board energy resources of cellular-connected UAVs. Simulation results show fast algorithm convergence and significant improvements in terms of channel secrecy capacity that can be achieved when UAVs assist terrestrial cellular networks as proposed here over state-of-the-art solutions. In addition, numerical results demonstrate that the proposed methods scale well with the number of users to be served and with different eavesdropping distributions. The presented solutions are wireless protocol agnostic, can complement traditional security principles, and can be extended to address other communication security and performance needs.

<p>In the process of designing an electric power supply system for an aircraft, parameters like low weight and low losses are important. Reliability, robustness and low cost are other important factors. In the Saab Gripen aircraft, the design of the primary power supply of the electric flight control system was updated by exchanging a switching transistor regulator to a magnetic amplifier (magamp). By introducing a magamp design, weight was saved and a more reliable power supply system at a lower cost was achieved.</p><p> In this particular case, with the power supply of the electric flight control system in the Saab Gripen fighter, advantage could be taken of a specific permanent magnet generator (PM-generator). The frequency of the generator offered the perfect conditions for a magamp controller. A key parameter in designing magnetic amplifiers (magamps) is low losses. New amorphous alloys offer new possibilities of the technique in designing magnetic amplifiers, because of their extremely low losses.</p><p> The core losses are evaluated by studying the equations and diagrams specifying the power losses. The core losses are evaluated and compared with the copper losses in the process of optimizing low weight and low losses. For this an engineering tool is developed and demonstrated.</p><p> Evaluations of the hysteresis characteristics for the magnetic alloys, as well as modeling and simulation of the core losses, are presented in this work. The modeling of the core losses includes hysteresis losses, eddy current losses and excess losses as well as copper losses. The losses are studied dynamically during realistic operational conditions. The model can be used for any generic analysis of hysteresis in magnetic circuits. Applications of magnetic amplifiers in aircrafts have been demonstrated to be a feasible alternative</p>

In the process of designing an electric power supply system for an aircraft, parameters like low weight and low losses are important. Reliability, robustness and low cost are other important factors. In the Saab Gripen aircraft, the design of the primary power supply of the electric flight control system was updated by exchanging a switching transistor regulator to a magnetic amplifier (magamp). By introducing a magamp design, weight was saved and a more reliable power supply system at a lower cost was achieved. In this particular case, with the power supply of the electric flight control system in the Saab Gripen fighter, advantage could be taken of a specific permanent magnet generator (PM-generator). The frequency of the generator offered the perfect conditions for a magamp controller. A key parameter in designing magnetic amplifiers (magamps) is low losses. New amorphous alloys offer new possibilities of the technique in designing magnetic amplifiers, because of their extremely low losses. The core losses are evaluated by studying the equations and diagrams specifying the power losses. The core losses are evaluated and compared with the copper losses in the process of optimizing low weight and low losses. For this an engineering tool is developed and demonstrated. Evaluations of the hysteresis characteristics for the magnetic alloys, as well as modeling and simulation of the core losses, are presented in this work. The modeling of the core losses includes hysteresis losses, eddy current losses and excess losses as well as copper losses. The losses are studied dynamically during realistic operational conditions. The model can be used for any generic analysis of hysteresis in magnetic circuits. Applications of magnetic amplifiers in aircrafts have been demonstrated to be a feasible alternative / QC 20101103