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

自9/11事件以来，机器人无人驾驶车辆系统(UVS)已被用于各种自然、恐怖和意外任务以及紧急情况，有时是成功的，但更多的是证实了它们的潜力。许多加拿大组织，如加拿大皇家骑警、加拿大搜救(SAR)、加拿大公园和娱乐加拿大以及军方都考虑在日常行动中使用地面、空中和水下UVS。尽管它们取得了较大的成功，并在合成孔径雷达、环境监测、森林火灾预防和监测等任务中前景光明，但在充分发挥UVS的全部潜力之前，必须在多个学科上做大量的工作。拟议的研究将开发有效的工具，使成群的不同类型的无人机能够在团队环境中执行复杂的行动，如合成孔径雷达、侦察、监视和环境监测。我们将开发包括智能控制和监测机制在内的硬件和软件工具，使机器人群体能够根据不断变化的任务规格和环境条件进行协作和执行复杂任务，以有效利用其设备。为便携式多机器人系统开发的方法将包括地面、空中和水下UVS，以实现真正的协作和分布式任务执行。地面和水下航行器将用于调查当地的地面和水面情况，空中机器人航行器将用于监测地理上分布的特派团。新的控制和协作方法将被开发出来，使这些车辆共享信息，智能地规划它们的协作行动，并在不同的系统和环境干扰下相互帮助。据设想，不同的机器人团队将能够应对任务规格的频繁变化、外部和内部干扰，同时仍能够按计划完成任务。有了这种系统，用户将能够使用无人驾驶飞行器在不利条件下执行特定的任务，这在目前的技术条件下是不可能的。

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.