Unmanned Aerial Sensor Placement for Cluttered Environments (IEEE RAL 2020)

Farinha, A., Zufferey, Zheng, P., R., Armanini, S.F., Kovac, M., Unmanned Aerial Sensor Placement for Cluttered Environments, IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters, 2020 Link to paper (open access link): Abstract: Unmanned aerial vehicles have been shown to be useful for the installation of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). More notably, the accurate placement of sensor nodes using UAVs, opens opportunities for many industrial and scientific uses, in particular, in hazardous environments or inaccessible locations. We propose and demonstrate a new aerial sensor placement method based on impulsive launching. Since direct physical interaction is not required, sensor deployment can be achieved in cluttered environments where the target location cannot be safely approached by the UAV, such as under the forest canopy. The proposed method is based on mechanical energy storage and an ultralight shape memory alloy trigger. The developed aerial system weighs a total