John G. Rogers U.S. Army Research Lab. (United States) Ryan E. Sherrill Air Force Research Lab. (United States) Arthur Schang Engility Corp. (United States) Shava L. Meadows Air Force Research Lab. (United States) Eric P. Cox Engility Corp. (United States) Brendan Byrne,David G. Baran U.S. Army Research Lab. (United States) J. Willard Curtis,Kevin M. Brink Air Force Research Lab. (United States)
Teams of small autonomous UAVs can be used to map and explore unknown environments which are inaccessible to teams of human operators in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts (HA/DR). In addition to HA/DR applications, teams of small autonomous UAVs can enhance Warfighter capabilities and provide operational stand-off for military operations such as cordon and search, counter-WMD, and other intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations. This paper will present a hardware platform and software architecture to enable distributed teams of heterogeneous UAVs to navigate, explore, and coordinate their activities to accomplish a search task in a previously unknown environment.
John G. Rogers,
Ryan E. Sherrill,
Arthur Schang,
Shava L. Meadows,
Eric P. Cox,
Brendan Byrne,
David G. Baran,
J. Willard Curtis,
Kevin M. Brink,
"Distributed subterranean exploration and mapping with teams of UAVs", Proc. SPIE 10190, Ground/Air Multisensor Interoperability, Integration, and Networking for Persistent ISR VIII, 1019017 (4 May 2017); doi: 10.1117/12.2266316; https://doi.org/10.1117/12.2266316
John G. Rogers, Ryan E. Sherrill, Arthur Schang, Shava L. Meadows, Eric P. Cox, Brendan Byrne, David G. Baran, J. Willard Curtis, Kevin M. Brink, "Distributed subterranean exploration and mapping with teams of UAVs," Proc. SPIE 10190, Ground/Air Multisensor Interoperability, Integration, and Networking for Persistent ISR VIII, 1019017 (4 May 2017);