Intelligent control methods for swarm robotic systems for environment monitoring, and search and rescue operations

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Robotic unmanned vehicle systems (UVS) have been used in various natural, terrorists and accidental missions and emergencies since 9/11, sometimes with success, but more often confirming their potential. Numerous Canadian organizations such as the RCMP, Canadian Search & Rescue (SAR), Parks and Recreation Canada, and the military have considered the use of ground, aerial and underwater UVS for their daily operations. Despite their relative success and their great promise for tasks such as SAR, environment monitoring, forest fire prevention and monitoring, etc. a great amount of work must be done across a number of disciplines before the full potential of UVS can be fully realized. The proposed research will develop effective tools to enable swarms of heterogeneous UVS to execute complex operations in team settings in the areas of SAR, reconnaissance, surveillance and environment monitoring. We will develop hardware and software tools including intelligent control and monitoring mechanisms to enable groups of robots to cooperate and perform complex tasks for the effective utilization of their equipment according to changing task specifications and environmental conditions. The methodologies to be developed for portable multi-robot systems will include ground, aerial and underwater UVS to allow a truly cooperative and distributed task execution. Ground and underwater vehicles will be used to investigate localized ground and surface situations while aerial robotic vehicles will be used to monitor geographically distributed missions. Novel control and cooperation methodologies will be developed to allow these vehicles share information, plan their cooperative actions intelligently, and help each other under diverse, system and environmental, disturbances. It is envisioned that heterogeneous robot teams will be able to cope with frequent changes in mission specifications, external and internal disturbances while still been able to accomplish their mission as planned. With such systems users will be able to use UVS for the execution of the given mission under adverse conditions which is not possible today using current technologies.