Design of multi-rotor unmanned aerial vehicle and optimization of resource allocation in wireless sensor networks

This thesis contains two different main research topics prepared Doç.Dr Coşku Kasnakoğlu and Doç.Dr Bulent Tavlı. The first part of the thesis explains the construction phases and implementation of a propeller-driven unmanned aerial vehicle which is one of the most researched subjects of our time. The hardware of the system was created from scratch. It was initially controlled by a developer based software language. Various experiments were carried out, numerical methods and measures were used to control the axes of the vehicle. Subsequently, the system was controlled by means of the data obtained and developed from these experiments. Finally, the designed vehicle used with an present autopilot system and have been studied for a better controller design. In the second part of the thesis, the impact of link unidirectionality and reverse path hop length on Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) lifetime is investigated through a novel Mixed Integer Programming (MIP) framework. A significant portion of links in various wireless network testbeds are shown to be unidirectional due to several physical factors (e.g., transceiver characteristics). Utilization of a unidirectional link necessitates the establishment of multi-hop reverse path for the completion of handshaking. Through the numerical evaluation of the created novel MIP model, the parameter space of WSNs is explored. The results show that reverse path length affects the network lifetime significantly. Furthermore, utilization of reverse paths consisting of more than a single relay node does not increase the network lifetime, considerably.