A collaborative Unmanned Helicopter control strategy for image compression and wireless transmission

Unmanned Helicopters operate in harsh environments and their effective stabilization while in hovering mode is desired in order to capture a scenery image. The image´s sharpness and contrast is affected by the camera´s-CCD exposure time. To increase this time interval, a model predictive controller is applied for attitude control purposes of an Unmanned quadrotor Helicopter (UqH). The acquired image by a camera attached to the UqH is compressed using a QuadTree Decomposition (QTD) scheme. The level of compression is dictated by the available bandwidth and the overall Quality of Service (QoS) of the available wireless downlink. The attributes of the controller are coupled to the QTD-compression level and experimental studies are offered to prove the efficiency of the suggested scheme.