An Autonomous Multirotor UAV for Security Systems in Rural South Africa

Effective security systems in rural South Africa are particularly challenging due to the rugged terrain and large areas in need of securing. The security of these areas is vital as they contribute greatly to the nation’s food security and tourism industry. The need for an effective security system in these areas is evident when examining the crime statistics regarding livestock theft and poaching. This paper proposes the use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), Robot Operating System (ROS), and the PX4 flight stack for automated alarm response, mission execution, and precise landings. We show that the automation is effective by simulating an alarm scenario and demonstrating the automation’s use in subsequent landing tests. The landing precision was quantified by the mean position error measured from the centre of a landing target and was found as 0.193m with a standard deviation of 0.064m. The small standard deviation indicates that the landing precision was highly repeatable. This showed a considerable improvement over GPS-based landings, which yielded an average deviation of 0.910m with a standard deviation of 0.424m. The standard deviation here clearly indicated that traditional GPS-based landings were unsuitable for this application. The use of analogue video transmission and telemetry radios allowed the proposed solution to function in areas without any existing network infrastructure. Our results show that a low-cost UAV system can be created to address the concerns related to alarm response times in rural South Africa.