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. ******[Objectives] Based on our previous work on formation control of multiple vehicle systems as well as application experience, a new research program is proposed to swarm a large number of unmanned vehicle systems in motion synchronization to target large-scale, spatial and temporal distributed dynamic applications. The main objective is to develop a so-called synchronized swarm intelligence of UVS for the target applications. Synchronization maintains UVS operation at the same rate in time-coordination; swarm allows for self-organization to reach “ ... an emergent behavior arising from simple rules” (www.wikipedia.org); and intelligence refers to a stimulated motivation to achieve specific mission tasks, The integration of temporal synchronization, spatial swarm and stimulated intelligence is custom developed for large-scale dynamic environmental applications. In the long run, the proposed research program is aimed at developing a disruptive technology to operate a large number of autonomous UVS in specialized applications.******The proposed research topic in large-scale dynamic applications is important to protect Canada's natural resources. Our proposed research program is novel, to the best of our knowledge, by introducing and integrating the concepts of synchronization (temporal), swarm (spatial), and stimulated intelligence. It is tailor designed for large-scale environmental applications. We believe that the success of the proposed research will bring the active UVS research to a significantly higher level of multiplicity, diversity and autonomy, to reach at its great potential. The proposed scientific approaches are both leading-edge academically and balanced in considering its feasibility in potential application.