Graduation Year

2018

Document Type

Thesis

Degree

M.S.

Degree Name

Master of Science (M.S.)

Degree Granting Department

Mechanical Engineering

Major Professor

Robert Bishop, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Jonathan Gaines, Ph.D.

Committee Member

Michael Guinn, M.S.B.E.

Keywords

DOA, Drone, DSP, FPGA, LabVIEW, Active Shooter

Abstract

A real time acoustic direction-finding module has been developed to estimate the ele- vation and azimuth of an impulsive event while function aboard a small unmanned air- craft vehicle. The generalized cross-correlation with phase transform method was used to estimate time differences of arrival in an 8 channel microphone array. A linear least squares approach was used to calculate an estimate for the direction of arrival. In order to accomplish this task, a vertical takeoff and landing small unmanned aircraft system was assembled to host the direction finding module. The module itself is made up of an eight-channel synchronous analog-to-digital converter connected to eight lightweight micro electro-mechanical microphones with pre-amplifiers. The data is processed on an embedded system with a field programmable gate array chip and a central processing unit. Noise canceling techniques were employed to address the noise propagating from the propellers under operation. The results from this research show that it is possible to perform direction-finding estimation while aboard an operating small unmanned aircraft vehicle with initial tests showing maximum errors of ± 7°.

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