Conclusions

Using UAVs is becoming popular and they are used in many applications; such as building inspection. In this project, we target a different application for the drones, where our drone is designed to measure the cooling leakage from skyscrapers using a chip thermal camera. The main components to achieve the design goal are thermal camera, pi camera, proximity sensors with Raspberry Pi 3. The circuit for the project design has been represented. The offered drone from the department has been tested in terms of its battery, flight controller, motors, and GPS to check its ability for flying properly. Actual tests have been carried out with satisfactory performance. Components have been selected after a thorough comparison within the market and comply with the design and constraints. The system has to send its data in real-time to the ground station for overall monitoring for the tested building and the drone to ensure its safety from the Lidar readings and Raspberry pi camera. The software part of this project was more challenging compared to the hardware part, we had to use four different programming languages, which are C with Arduino IDE, MATLAB for image processing, Java for the Android mobile application, and Python with sensors that are connected with Raspberry Pi 3. In this project, firebase database has been used to store the data from the system’s sensors, as a result, the user can basically have real-time data viewing for the system with its two parts, which are drone and inside building monitoring.

 Recommendations for Future Work

First of all, the work that has been done in SDP1 is validated while working on SDP2. Nevertheless, because of the current situation and spreading of COVID-19, the project did not achieve the expected aims and objective for several reasons. The system hardware using the collected components form SDP1 has started to be implemented after testing each component one at a time to replace any defected components. Also, at the beginning of the semester, there was a discussion of how to build the mobile application, if either using an Internet of things (IoT) platform or building an application from scratch using android studio for example. As a future work for this project, the permission for flying the drone will be received from Qatar RC sports centre as the main aim of this project is to measure the cooling leakage from the high-rise buildings by using the UVA. After that, the team members will engage live camera streaming with the android mobile application and improve the thermal image processing algorithm. After that, the obtained results will be organized in a report with the energy efficiency (cooling leakage) of the measured buildings. The report will be facilitated to interested parties.