ITR - (NHS+ASE) - (dmc+int): Distributed Communications and Control for Multiple Miniature Unmanned Air Vehicles

Brigham Young University, Provo UT

Investigators

Abstract

Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) are playing increasingly prominent roles in the nation's defense programs and strategy. There are innumerable uses for such devices in not only military, but civilian, commerical and homeland security applications such as surveillance and reconnaissance, rapid deployment of communication networks, border patrol, sensing hazardous environments, search and rescue, precision agriculture, etc. The focus of this research is on the use of multiple miniature UAVs (MUAVs) for these applications rather than their larger military counterparts such as Predator and Global Hawk. MUAVs have a number of significant advantages over larger platforms, such as their difficulty in being detected or tracked, their ability to more easily avoid threats, to fly at low altitudes and collect more localized data, to be launched without special equipment or a runway, and to spread out and provide a wide ``aperture'' for performing tasks such as geolocation or providing communications links. The benefits of MUAVs do not come without cost, however. There are a number of difficult challenges that must be overcome before their potential can be realized. These challenges include the following: How can a distributed group of MUAVs cooperate and communicate given their constraints on size, power and motion, and in the presence of interference? How are discrepancies in their individual data sets accounted for so that consensus on strategy can be reached? Their mobility is both a blessing and a curse; can the ever-changing shape of an array of MUAV platforms be adequately tracked or maintained for high-resolution localization or imaging tasks? This research effort is devoted to answering questions such as those above.