ITR - (NHS+ASE) - (dmc+int): Distributed Communications and Control for Multiple Miniature Unmanned Air Vehicles

无人机(UAV)在国家国防计划和战略中发挥着越来越重要的作用。这种设备不仅在军事上有无数的用途，而且在民用、商业和国土安全应用中也有无数的用途，如监视和侦察、快速部署通信网络、边境巡逻、感知危险环境、搜索和救援、精准农业等。本研究的重点是将多个微型无人机(MUAV)用于这些应用，而不是使用更大的军用无人机，如捕食者和全球鹰。与大型平台相比，MUAV具有许多显著的优势，如难以被探测或跟踪，更容易避开威胁，在低空飞行并收集更多本地化数据，无需特殊设备或跑道即可发射，以及展开并为执行地理定位或提供通信链路等任务提供广泛的“口径”。然而，MUAV的好处并非没有代价。在实现其潜力之前，必须克服一些困难的挑战。这些挑战包括：在大小、动力和运动受限的情况下，以及在存在干扰的情况下，一组分散的MUAV如何进行合作和通信？如何解释它们各自数据集的差异，以便就战略达成共识？它们的机动性既是好事也是坏事；对于高分辨率定位或成像任务，能否充分跟踪或维护MUAV平台阵列不断变化的形状？本研究致力于回答上述问题。

Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) are playing increasingly prominent roles in the nation's defense programs and strategy. There are innumerable uses for such devices in not only military, but civilian, commerical and homeland security applications such as surveillance and reconnaissance, rapid deployment of communication networks, border patrol, sensing hazardous environments, search and rescue, precision agriculture, etc. The focus of this research is on the use of multiple miniature UAVs (MUAVs) for these applications rather than their larger military counterparts such as Predator and Global Hawk. MUAVs have a number of significant advantages over larger platforms, such as their difficulty in being detected or tracked, their ability to more easily avoid threats, to fly at low altitudes and collect more localized data, to be launched without special equipment or a runway, and to spread out and provide a wide ``aperture'' for performing tasks such as geolocation or providing communications links.The benefits of MUAVs do not come without cost, however. There are a number of difficult challenges that must be overcome before their potential can be realized. These challenges include the following: How can a distributed group of MUAVs cooperate and communicate given their constraints on size, power and motion, and in the presence of interference? How are discrepancies in their individual data sets accounted for so that consensus on strategy can be reached? Their mobility is both a blessing and a curse; can the ever-changing shape of an array of MUAV platforms be adequately tracked or maintained for high-resolution localization or imaging tasks? This research effort is devoted to answering questions such as those above.