Autonomous Unmanned Heterogeneous Vehicles for Persistent Monitoring
Résumé
Swarms of unmanned vehicles (air and ground) can increase the efficiency and effectiveness of military and law enforcement operations by enhancing situational awareness and allow the persistent monitoring of multiple hostile targets. The key focus in the development of the enabling technologies for swarm systems, is the minimisation of uncertainties in situational awareness information for surveillance operations supported by a 'system of systems' composed by static and mobile heterogeneous sensors. The identified critical enabling techniques and technologies for adaptive, informative and reconfigurable operations of unmanned swarm systems are: Robust Static sensor network design, mobile sensor tasking (including reallocation), Sensor fusion, Information fusion including behaviour monitoring. The work presented in this paper describes one of the first attempts to integrate all swarm related technologies into a practical demonstration, demonstrating the benefits of swarms of heterogeneous vehicles for defence applications used for the persistent monitoring of high value assets such as military installations and camps. The key enabling swarm system technologies are analysed and novel algorithms are developed and presented, which can be implemented in COTS based unmanned vehicles available today and have thus been designed and optimised to require small computational power, be flexible, reconfigurable and which can be implemented in a large range of commercially available unmanned vehicles (air and ground).