Event-Based Emergency Detection for Safe Drone

Quadrotor drones have rapidly gained interest recently. Numerous studies are underway for the commercial use of autonomous drones, and distribution businesses especially are taking serious reviews on drone-delivery services. However, there are still many concerns about urban drone operations. The risk of failures and accidents makes it difficult to provide drone-based services in the real world with ease. There have been many studies that introduced supplementary methods to handle drone failures and emergencies. However, we discovered the limitation of the existing methods. Most approaches were improving PID-based control algorithms, which is the dominant drone-control method. This type of low-level approach lacks situation awareness and the ability to handle unexpected situations. This study introduces an event-based control methodology that takes a high-level diagnosing approach that can implement situation awareness via a time-window. While low-level controllers are left to operate drones most of the time in normal situations, our controller operates at a higher level and detects unexpected behaviors and abnormal situations of the drone. We tested our method with real-time 3D computer simulation environments and in several cases, our method was able to detect emergencies that typical PID controllers were not able to handle. We were able to verify that our approach can provide enhanced double safety and better ensure safe drone operations. We hope our discovery can possibly contribute to the advance of real-world drone services in the near future.