Outline
The focus of SUAAVE lies in the creation and control of swarms of helicopter UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that are individually autonomous (i.e not under the direct realtime control of a human) but that collaboratively self-organise: to sense the environment in the most efficient way possible; to respond to node failures; and to report their findings to a base station on the ground.
Such clouds (or swarms or flocks) of helicopters have a wide variety of applications in both civil and military domains since they are rapidly deployable and highly survivable. In effect there are three separate capabilities for use in addressing application-specific problems: (i) ground sensing of various types; (ii) atmospheric sampling; and (iii) the ability to bridge communications, all within a rapidly deployable, survivable, hands-off package. Examples of these include: search and rescue; pollution monitoring; chemical/biological/radiological weapons plume monitoring; disaster recovery - e.g. (flood) damage assessment; sniper location; communication bridging in ad hoc situations; and overflight of sensor fields for the purposes of collecting data.
The novelty of these mobile sensor systems is that their movement is controlled by fully autonomous tasking algorithms with two important objectives: first, to increase sensing coverage to rapidly identify targets; and, second, to maintain network connectivity to enable real-time communication between UAVs and ground-based crews. The project has four main scientific themes: (i) wireless networking as applied in a controllable free-space transmission environment with three free directions in which UAVs can move; (ii) control theory as applied to aerial vehicles, with the intention of creating truly autonomous agents that can be tasked but do not need a man-in-the-loop control in real time to operate and communicate; (iii) artificial intelligence and optimisation theory as applied to a real search problem; (iv) data fusion from multiple, possibly heterogeneous airborne sensors as applied to construct and present accurate information to situation commanders.
Research objectives
- To engineer a fully autonomous aerial platform consisting of multiple helicopter UAVs capable of searching for a given target – in the first instance, a person in open countryside. The platform to be developed includes both computing hardware and software components; the airframes themselves will be COTS products.
- To research control theoretic principles that are applicable to wireless networks and to implement such within the context of controlling multiple helicopters that have several purposes:
- Platform establishment – flying autonomously, avoiding collision, maintaining station, and landing safely.
- Transmitting information to one or more ground receiving stations, moving, where necessary, to maintain an established route.
- To research and implement distributed search strategies that allow a group of UAVs to autonomously identify a given target, coordinating their movement to:
- Maximize coverage of the search area in the minimum time, given maps as input;
- Maintain a desired level of radio connectivity in order to (i) exchange control information among UAVs to cooperatively search the area, and (ii) exchange sensor information among UAVs to detect a target cooperatively and (iii) report their findings to base stations, given that not all (and maybe no) UAVs will be within a one-hop radius of a commander.
- To explore the principles and practice of data fusion as apply in these circumstances
- Decentralised data fusion algorithms to generate consistent estimates of environment and robot state
- Track ownership issues to decide who has primary responsibility for tasking agents within the cloud
- Build 3D environmental models of occulters where radio communications are poor
- To research and implement a range of networking technologies in support of these activities
- To take real measurements and characterise the nature of the radio environment, which appears to be close to free space and therefore susceptible to easy modelling.
- To investigate appropriate MAC protocols
- To investigate the use of intentional movement (both store-and-forward and movement in 3D) in transmitting data back to situation commanders, both synchronously and asynchronously.
- To present information in a coherent and easily comprehensible way to search teams and to the situation commander.
The SUAAVE project will adopt a practical engineering approach, building real prototypes in conjunction with an impressive list of external partners, including HOSDB, the field's industry leaders, and an international collaborator .
Academic Consortium Members
| UCL | Stephen Hailes, Simon Julier |
|---|---|
| Oxford | Niki Trigoni, Stephen Cameron |
| Ulster | Gerard Parr, Sally McClean |