HAWK: An unmanned mini helicopter-based aerial wireless kit for localization

This paper presents a fully functional and highly portable mini Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) system, HAWK, for conducting aerial localization. HAWK is a programmable mini helicopter - Draganflyer X6 - armed with a wireless sniffer - Nokia N900. We developed custom PI-Control laws to implement a robust waypoint algorithm for the mini helicopter to fly a planned route. A Moore space filling curve is designed as a flight route for HAWK to survey a specific area. A set of theorems were derived to calculate the minimum Moore curve level for sensing all targets in the area with minimum flight distance. With such a flight strategy, we can confine the location of a target of interest to a small hot area. We can recursively apply the Moore curve based flight route to the hot area for a fine-grained localization of a target of interest. Therefore, HAWK does not rely on a positioning infrastructure for localization. We have conducted extensive experiments to validate the feasibility of HAWK and our theory. A demo of HAWK in autonomous fly is available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ju86xnHbEq0.