Synchronized Swarm of Unmanned Vehicle Systems for Large-Scale Dynamic Applications

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Research on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs, or drones) and unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs, or robots) hold great promise for a wide range of applications. Over the past 10 years, our research team has developed expertise in cooperative control of multiple autonomous unmanned systems and has gained much experience in several commercial applications, including successful field demonstrations in wildfire monitoring, wetland inspection, as well as city traffic management. From the applications’ perspective, the environmental factors (e.g., fire progress, algal bloom, traffic growth) share common features of being large in scale, and being dynamic in both spatial and temporal distribution. It is natural to see the benefit of using a fleet of unmanned vehicle systems, or UVS, to cover a large complicated environmental scope in a timely fashion. From the vehicles’ perspective, these unmanned systems need to operate in a coordinated, intelligent way to deal with these applications. They also need to be highly autonomous in self-organization and stimulated in achieving mission specific tasks, such as mapping the fire/algal/traffic growth.