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

无人驾驶飞行器（uav）在国家国防计划和战略中发挥着越来越突出的作用。这些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，通信网络的快速部署，边境巡逻，感知危险环境，搜索和救援，精准农业等。这项研究的重点是在这些应用中使用多种微型无人机（muav），而不是像“捕食者”和“全球鹰”这样的大型军用无人机。与大型平台相比，muav具有许多显着优势，例如它们难以被探测或跟踪，它们更容易避免威胁的能力，在低空飞行并收集更多本地化数据的能力，无需特殊设备或跑道即可发射，并且可以展开并提供大“孔径”以执行诸如地理定位或提供通信链路等任务。然而，muav的好处并非没有成本。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：考虑到它们在尺寸、功率和运动方面的限制，以及存在干扰的情况下，分布式的muav组如何进行合作和通信？如何解释各自数据集的差异，以便就策略达成共识？他们的流动性既是福也是祸；无人机平台阵列不断变化的形状能否被充分跟踪或维护，以实现高分辨率定位或成像任务？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.