Autonomous Coordination of Aerial Vehicles for Marine Search and Rescue

This paper presents a coordinated control technique that allows teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and manned rescue helicopters to autonomously search for and track multiple life rafts in a marine disaster scenario. A sensor model and an objective function are first proposed to stochastically enable coordinated search within the recursive Bayesian filter framework. Once a life raft has been found, a UAV and a helicopter cooperatively rescue victims on the life raft. Numerical results first show the superiority of the proposed technique to the conventional marine search techniques. The proposed technique was then applied to a practical marine search-and-rescue (SAR) scenario where heterogeneous vehicles coordinated to search for and track multiple targets. The result has demonstrated the applicability of the technique to various real world scenarios.