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Thales_ Drone Surveillance

Team members

Ho Si Ci (EPD), Luu Nguyen Nguyen Long (EPD), Chew Yoong Hao (EPD), Koh Kai Ting (ESD), Lee Wei Yang (ESD), Lim Xin Yi (ISTD)

Instructors:

Nagarajan Raghavan, Berrak Sisman, Francisco Benita

Writing Instructors:

Delfinn Tan

Teaching Assistant:

Du Zongyang

In Collaboration With:

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PREVIEW


PROBLEM STATEMENT

With the anticipated increase in drone usage, there is also an increasing threat of abusing this technology. As a result, public agencies in Singapore are driven to establish a drone surveillance system in the urban environment. However, conventional drone surveillance systems in the market have high false alarm rates when adopted in Singapore. This is due to the prevalence of densely populated high-rise buildings and high levels of environmental interference. Current radar surveillance systems are costly, static, and non-adaptive to moving targets

OUR APPROACH



Small radars will be installed at the side of buildings, fences, or lampposts. A system with a platform and web app to house and control a single radar to ensure lower costs. It will have a wide azimuth coverage and be adaptive for users to control its orientation and scan rate.

 

 

THALES (TRT) CONCEPT DEMO SYSTEM

trtconceptdemo


Thales Research and Technology (TRT) team has been researching ways to develop an urban drone surveillance system. They had currently undergone a total of 8 trials over the course of 2 years.



However, they have been facing issues such as long data processing time, unable to access real-time data during field tests, and long preparation time needed before going for field tests.

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TRT TRIAL RESULTS






One radar only has an azimuth coverage of about 18.2 degrees. However, for drone tracking, it is ideal to have at least 48 degrees of coverage. Hence, three radars was used instead of one.

3radarplot1

 

Data is being collected by 3 radar units. This meant that each radar has its own RDplot. This made it difficult to conduct data processing afterward as time synchronisation is required to create a combined radar range time plot. Hence, too much time was spent in the data processing phase.  

OUR DESIGN DIRECTION



Objective
We had first set the objective of our project. We hope to design a multi-interface platform that is portable, allows changing radar orientation, has secure, real-time data transmission, and reduce the costs of the initial TRT prototype.

designdirectoin
1designexploration designexploration


Where We Started

To start with our design exploration, we had asked 4 main questions:
1. Where would user view the live data?
2. How would the data be transmitted?
3. How would the radar's direction be chanegd and recorded?
4. Where to store the data such that it is secure?
This led us to identify 2 components that addresses the questions - Platform Control System and Radar Module.

INTRODUCING




RADAR MODULE




Introducing the radar platform control system, SPIRE. It is multidirectional to effectively detect flying drones with panning and tilting axis of the radar and powered with high torque motors that is capable of high precision with specially designed and fitted encoders to calibrate the angle and speed of rotation. In addition, SPIRE has a special dome that is designed for efficient radar waves transmission and weatherproofing.


DESIGN INSPIRATIONS

DIRECT DRIVE

WORM GEAR


 

 

FINAL CONCEPT SELECTED



ITERATIONS


TESTING

WEATHER PROOFING TEST

The exterior radome is made up of water-resistant polylactide material to keep rain and dust out. This grants SPIRE the flexibility to be deployed outdoors while remaining operable in the case of wet weather conditions.


RADOME TEST

Field testing of SPIRE validates its detection capability while panning. The position of the subject matter is captured and recorded.

HEAT FLOW SIMULATIONS

Computational fluid dynamics analyzes the air flow pattern of the inlet fan to determine the steady state temperature of the components within the radome. The operating temperature of the radome is approximately 68oC.


PLATFORM CONTROL SYSTEM

DATA TRANSMISSION

DATABASE FLOW
Data collected from the hardware such as encoders, compass module, and temperature sensors are sent to the IoT Backend and stored in the Database. The data is also retrieved by the front end to be visualized.





TOOLS USED
For database management, we used MySQL as it is able to set up a locally hosted database.
For the development of APIs, Flask is used to allow transmission of data to occur between the database and the frontend. To transmit data from the IoT backend to the database, MQTT was used as the messaging protocol.
During our testing and troubleshooting phase, Postman was used to test the APIs while MQTT X was used to ensure the payload is received from the IoT backend.




DATABASE SCHEMA
A total of two tables were created in MySQL.
The InputParameter table stores the of parameters input by user in the Web App which is used for the analysis.
The DataLog stores values of sensors and working conditions of the gimbal in real time.


FRONTEND WEB APPLICATION


REACT JS
The frontend web application was developed using the ReactJS framework, HTML, and CSS. This enabled reusable components and a more efficient development experience.

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chakra ui




INITIALISATION PAGE
This page serves to facilitate iterative research trials for the gimbal system. Users can set the gimbal initialisation parameters easily and are also able to view previous test settings. This enables more efficient research to be conducted on the gimbal system.

CHAKRA UI
To support the web application development in ReactJS, we also used Chakra UI, which is a user interface component library. This helped us to achieve consistency in our user interface styling and improve development efficiency as well.

 

 






DASHBOARD PAGE


Users can view real-time gimbal data as well as the entire system's status on this page. This will help users to ensure that all components are functioning as expected and to troubleshoot any issues that arise.




START & STOP GIMBAL
The dashboard page also possesses a feature where the user is able to start and stop the gimbal during the research trial. This ensures that the researchers can collect the relevant and time-specific data, allowing easier post-processing.


FEEDBACK

TEAM MEMBERS

student Ho Si Ci Engineering Product Development
student Luu Nguyen Nguyen Long Engineering Product Development
student Chew Yoong Hao Engineering Product Development
student Koh Kai Ting Engineering Systems and Design
student Lee Wei Yang Engineering Systems and Design
student Lim Xin Yi Information Systems Technology and Design

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