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

无人驾驶飞行器(UAV)和无人地面飞行器(UGV)的研究具有广泛的应用前景。在过去的10年里，我们的研究团队在多个自主无人系统的协作控制方面积累了专业知识，并在几个商业应用方面获得了丰富的经验，包括在野火监测、湿地检查以及城市交通管理方面的成功现场演示。从应用的角度来看，环境因素(如火灾进展、水华、交通增长)具有规模大、时空分布动态的共同特点。使用一支无人驾驶车辆系统(UVS)及时覆盖大型复杂环境范围的好处是很自然的。从车辆的角度来看，这些无人驾驶系统需要以协调、智能的方式运行，以处理这些应用。他们还需要在自我组织方面具有高度的自主性，并在完成特定任务方面受到刺激，例如绘制火/藻/交通增长的地图。[目的]在前人对多车系统编队控制研究的基础上，结合实际应用经验，针对大规模、时空分布的动态应用，提出了一种新的研究方案，即大量无人车系统同步运动。其主要目标是为目标应用开发一种所谓的UVS同步群体智能。同步在时间协调上保持UVS以相同的速率运行；群允许自组织到达“...简单规则产生的紧急行为“(www.wikipedia.org)；智能是指完成特定任务的激发动机，时间同步、空间群体和激发智力的集成是为大规模动态环境应用定制开发的。从长远来看，拟议的研究计划旨在开发一种颠覆性技术，以在专业应用中运行大量自主UV。*提出的研究课题在大规模动态应用中对保护加拿大的自然资源具有重要意义。据我们所知，我们提出的研究方案是新颖的，通过引入和整合同步(时间)、群体(空间)和刺激智能的概念。它是专为大规模环境应用而设计的。我们相信，拟议研究的成功将使活跃的UVS研究达到更高的多样性、多样性和自主性水平，以达到其巨大的潜力。拟议的科学方法在学术上是前沿的，在考虑其潜在应用的可行性方面也是平衡的。

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.