Acquisition of Cooperative Small Unmanned Aerial Systems for Advancing Man Machine Interface Research

Abstract : Project Description: The value of the cooperative, dynamic environment sensing technologies lies in their relevancy to a number of present and future military applications, including bio-inspired, adaptive, reconfigurable, and synthesized sensing using cooperative sensor platforms. In this project, we aim to develop distributed algorithms to optimally sense dynamically changing environments by formulating synthetic, global sensor field of views (FOVs), mimicking biological systems such as an insect fly eye, but allowing multiple aperture configurations. Due to the desired nature of distributed networked aerial vehicles (for the purpose of scalability), the environmental sensing and information fusion must be performed asynchronously at dispersed locations, making the cooperative environmental sensing even more challenging. We are developing autonomous cooperative technologies to allow sensor platforms to control their poses in order to reconfigure the overall synthetic FOV to respond to the changes in their operating environments.