Three dimensional noise mapping system with aerial blimp robot

Recently, Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) is used in various situations and research fields, because of low cost and high convenience. For instance, there are many measurement and monitoring systems for taking environmental information by analyzing the image data which is acquired from the air with the UAVs. The UAVs with some propellers, such as quadcopter, always needs to rotate the propellers during flying. The noises of rotating propellers and makes collecting sound information with UAV difficult. In this study, we proposed the environmental sound recording system using a blimp which is filled with helium gas. The system has four propellers in the horizontal direction and two propellers in the vertical direction. This system has also a control board which has a SoC (including both FPGA and CPU) with embedded Linux OS to control six DC motors attaching to the each propeller and to communicate with PC through wireless LAN. The control board can record a sound signal with an A/D converter and an external memory. The experimental results show that it is efficient to make noise maps in horizontal and vertical planes by using the proposed system.