Multiple eyes in the skies: architecture and perception issues in the COMETS unmanned air vehicles project

This paper describes the COMETS (Real-Time Coordination and Control of Multiple Heterogeneous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) Project, which is aimed at designing and implementing a system for cooperative activities using heterogeneous UAVs. Heterogeneity is considered both in terms of aerial vehicles and onboard processing capabilities ranging from fully autonomous systems to conventional remotely piloted vehicles. COMETS also involves cooperative environmental perception including fire detection and monitoring as well as terrain mapping.

[1]  Gösta H. Granlund,et al.  Robust Multi-scale Extraction of Blob Features , 2003, SCIA.

[2]  Rachid Alami,et al.  A distributed tasks allocation scheme in multi-UAV context , 2004, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2004. Proceedings. ICRA '04. 2004.

[3]  Mario Innocenti,et al.  Autonomous formation flight , 2000 .

[4]  Dana S. Nau,et al.  SHOP2: An HTN Planning System , 2003, J. Artif. Intell. Res..

[5]  Simon Lacroix,et al.  The Autonomous Blimp Project of LAAS/CNRS - Current Status , 2002, ISER.

[6]  Anibal Ollero,et al.  Automatic threshold selection for infrared images of fires. , 2002 .

[7]  William B. Carlton,et al.  Dynamic Routing of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles Using Reactive Tabu Search , 2001 .

[8]  Timothy W. McLain,et al.  A decomposition strategy for optimal coordination of unmanned air vehicles , 2000, Proceedings of the 2000 American Control Conference. ACC (IEEE Cat. No.00CH36334).

[9]  A. Ollero,et al.  Helicopter Teleoperation for Aerial Monitoring in the COMETS Multi-UAV System , 2003 .

[10]  Aníbal Ollero,et al.  An Intelligent System for False Alarm Reduction in Infrared Forest-Fire Detection , 2000, IEEE Intell. Syst..

[11]  Rachid Alami,et al.  A Scheme for Coordinating Multi-robots Planning Activities and Plans Execution , 1998, ECAI.

[12]  S. Shankar Sastry,et al.  Pursuit-evasion games with unmanned ground and aerial vehicles , 2001, Proceedings 2001 ICRA. IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (Cat. No.01CH37164).

[13]  G. Sukhatme,et al.  Autonomous Flying Vehicle Research at the University of Southern California , 2002 .

[14]  Aníbal Ollero,et al.  Real-Time Feature Matching in Image Sequences for Non-Structured Environments. Applications to Vehicle Guidance , 2000, J. Intell. Robotic Syst..

[15]  Tony Lindeberg,et al.  Scale-Space Theory in Computer Vision , 1993, Lecture Notes in Computer Science.

[16]  Begoña C. Arrue,et al.  Smoke detection using image processing. , 2002 .

[17]  Per-Erik Forssén.  Updating Camera Location and Heading using a Sparse Displacement Field , 2000 .

[18]  Simon Lacroix,et al.  Embedding heterogeneous levels of decisional autonomy in multi-robot systems , 2004, DARS.

[19]  Gösta H. Granlund,et al.  Unrestricted Recognition of 3-D Objects for Robotics Using Multi-Level Triplet Invariants , 2004 .

[20]  Simon Lacroix,et al.  Simultaneous Localization and Mapping with Stereovision , 2003, ISRR.