Dr. Robot Nerd School

At long last, here are all the materials from my Master’s Thesis:

Abstract

There can be little doubt that Hurricane Katrina will always be remembered for the damage and devastation it caused. But it also provided the first opportunity for MAVs to be used and evaluated during Search and Rescue (SAR) as well as recovery operations. Researchers from The Center for Robot-Assisted Search And Rescue (CRASAR) made two separate deployments to areas affected by Hurricane Katrina: one during initial SAR operations and a second deployment during recovery operations 90 days later. Using data and observations from both of these deployments, this work draws four key findings about semi-autonomous Miniature UAV (MAV) operations in urban environments. These findings are intended to guide future MAV research as well as serve as a roadmap for the evolution from semi-autonomous to fully autonomous MAV capabilities. These findings are as follows: the minimum useful standoff distance from inspected structures is 2-5 m, omni-directional sensor capabilities are needed for obstacle avoidance, GPS waypoint navigation is unnecessary, and that these operations currently require three operators for one MAV.

Link to the PDF: Master’s Thesis

And linked offsite to save space (so, email me if these links ever break):

The sources (LaTeX, BibTeX, style class, and images to build the pdf): Sources.zip

The Keynote presentation: Master’s Defense
PDF export of presentation + videos: Master’s Defense PDF
(there is a list of which video goes to what slide in the zip)

And finally, as with the thesis itself, all of this is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license: CC 3.0 By-NC

I will be publishing my Masters’ thesis under a Creative Commons Attribution, Non-Commercial license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/), so I’ve started a collection of other theses and dissertations doing this.
Access to Knowledge in a Network Society by Karsten Gerloff, published by the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE)
http://www.epsc.upc.es/en/?q=node/103

A Framework for Open Source Projects by Gregor Rothfuss
BoingBoing post on CC licensed dissertations BoingBoing post pointing to some of the earliest known cases of CC-licensed academic work in the wild.  It should also be noted that my licensing my masters this way is primarily due to Cory’s evangelism on this count, and particularly some comments about the nature of “The Academy”
http://www.carlaz.com/phd/

http://oacaltech.blogspot.com/2006/06/oleg-evnin-uses-his-phd-dissertation.html

http://www.ituniv.se/~klang/web/thesis/

(also wicked old and posted from LAS waiting for HNL)