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

无人机（UAV）在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用途，而且在民用、军事和国土安全应用中也有无数用途，例如监视和侦察、通信网络的快速部署、边境巡逻、感测危险环境、搜索和救援、精确农业、本研究的重点是多架微型无人机（MUAVs）的使用这些应用，而不是他们的大型军事同行，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，例如它们难以被发现或跟踪，它们能够更容易地避开威胁，在低空飞行并收集更多的本地数据，在没有特殊设备或跑道的情况下发射，并展开并提供一个广泛的``然而，MUAV的好处并不是没有代价的。 在实现其潜力之前，必须克服一些困难的挑战。 这些挑战包括以下几个方面：在尺寸、功率和运动受限的情况下，以及在存在干扰的情况下，一组分布式MUAV如何进行协作和通信？ 如何解释其个人数据集的差异，以便就战略达成共识？ 它们的机动性是福也是祸; MUAV平台阵列不断变化的形状是否能够被充分跟踪或保持，以执行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.