Pre-seed Project - Autonomous UAVs for tactical missions and critical infrastructure protection.

In Pre-seed project we are developing system for carrying out surveillance missions over areas of interest such as oil pipelines, gas pipelines, electric power lines, warehouses, harbors, airports or other critical infrastructures. The system utilize autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that allow more complex coverage of areas of interest and faster data collection. The data from onboard sensors are transmitted to the operator in real time, thus improving the quality of his/her decisions.

This way the system allows both regular inspections of infrastructures, patrolling over areas of interest for higher security and protection against intrusion or damage or tracking of moving ground targets.

 

The system is composed from a set of software modules that can be divided in three categories: (i) system for operator's decision support running on the ground station computer, (ii) algorithms for planning and trajectory control of the UAVs that run on UAV's on-board computer, and (iii) monitoring software for dynamic analysis of the system's behavior and automatic parameters adjustment according to the actual situation. The fundamental solution is in algorithms for planning and UAV trajectory control that enables autonomous actions of the UAV team with regard to their flight parameters, sensory payload, particular mission, surrounding terrain etc. During the team mission, UAVs detects and avoids possible mutual collision situations.

 

In case of patrolling for search of possible intrusion we deployed game theoretic models of adversary behavior to predict possible actions of attackers so that the UAVs are able to take that behavior into account and plan the most effective and unpredictable patrolling trajectory.

 

This project is being investigated in close cooperation with the ARETHUS project.

 

Involved: Milan Rollo, Petr Benda