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Welcome to the homepage for the SUAAVE (Sensing, Unmanned, Autonomous Aerial VEhicles) research project. SUAAVE is an EPSRC funded project (EP/F064179/1), which will run for 3.5 years from October 2008. It is funded as part of the WINES-III managed call.

SUAAVE

The SUAAVE consortium is an interdisciplinary group in the fields of computer science and engineering. Its focus is to investigate and elucidate the principles underlying the control of clouds of networked resource-limited unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) acting as sensor platforms, that are targeted towards achieving a global objective in an efficient manner. The results of this must be communicated to a ground controller.

Outline

The focus of SUAAVE lies in the creation and control of swarms of helicopter UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) that are individually autonomous (i.e not under the direct realtime control of a human) but that collaboratively self-organise: to sense the environment in the most efficient way possible; to respond to node failures; and to report their findings to a base station on the ground.

Such clouds (or swarms or flocks) of helicopters have a wide variety of applications in both civil and military domains since they are rapidly deployable and highly survivable. In effect there are three separate capabilities for use in addressing application-specific problems: (i) ground sensing of various types; (ii) atmospheric sampling; and (iii) the ability to bridge communications, all within a rapidly deployable, survivable, hands-off package. Examples of these include: search and rescue; pollution monitoring; chemical/biological/radiological weapons plume monitoring; disaster recovery - e.g. (flood) damage assessment; sniper location; communication bridging in ad hoc situations; and overflight of sensor fields for the purposes of collecting data.

The novelty of these mobile sensor systems is that their movement is controlled by fully autonomous tasking algorithms with two important objectives: first, to increase sensing coverage to rapidly identify targets; and, second, to maintain network connectivity to enable real-time communication between UAVs and ground-based crews. The project has four main scientific themes: (i) wireless networking as applied in a controllable free-space transmission environment with three free directions in which UAVs can move; (ii) control theory as applied to aerial vehicles, with the intention of creating truly autonomous agents that can be tasked but do not need a man-in-the-loop control in real time to operate and communicate; (iii) artificial intelligence and optimisation theory as applied to a real search problem; (iv) data fusion from multiple, possibly heterogeneous airborne sensors as applied to construct and present accurate information to situation commanders.

Academic Consortium Members

UCL	Stephen Hailes (PI), Simon Julier
Oxford	Niki Trigoni, Stephen Cameron
Ulster	Gerard Parr, Sally McClean