Becker, Aaron T.2020-01-08December 22018-12December 2Portions of this document appear in: Sudarshan, Srikanth KV, Victor Montano, An Nguyen, Michael McClimans, Li Chang, Robert R. Stewart, and Aaron T. Becker. "A heterogeneous robotics team for large-scale seismic sensing." IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters 2, no. 3 (2017): 1328-1335. And in: Nguyen, An, Dominik Krupke, Mary Burbage, Shriya Bhatnagar, Sándor P. Fekete, and Aaron T. Becker. "U sing a UAV for Destructive Surveys of Mosquito Population." In 2018 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pp. 7812-7819. IEEE, 2018.https://hdl.handle.net/10657/5857An unmanned vehicle, such as a flying multi-copter, an unmanned rover, a remote-controlled boat, can be used to cover a large area of land, to perform repetitive, tedious yet strenuous tasks for people. We can have an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) distribute a network of seismic microphone, used during seismic surveying, in treacherous terrain, free of heavy signal wiring, without risking injury to human workers. A UAV can sweep a large area with a mosquito-zapping net, destructively sampling mosquito population in the area, giving entomology researcher better data about their distribution and behavior through time and space. An unmanned boat, or a UAV, can distribute a drifting wireless sensor network (WSN) into a body of water. The same, or several unmanned vehicles, can then monitor, recharge and finally recollect them. The following thesis presents hardware for all of the above applications, as well as software and algorithms for the unmanned vehicles, and sensor nodes.application/pdfengThe author of this work is the copyright owner. UH Libraries and the Texas Digital Library have their permission to store and provide access to this work. UH Libraries has secured permission to reproduce any and all previously published materials contained in the work. Further transmission, reproduction, or presentation of this work is prohibited except with permission of the author(s).Unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)Wireless sensor network (WSN)2020-01-08Thesisborn digital