Localizing Stationary Targets with Cooperative Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) play an increasingly important role in a large number of military applications. Frequently deployed for intelligence collection (e.g., surveillance and reconnaissance), they are also useful for establishing long-range communication and providing tactical support. The focus of our research lies on the design and development of autonomous, cooperative UAVs using distributed control, sensing, and communication technologies. In this paper, we present several UAV technologies we developed that enable a team of UAVs to autonomously search, detect, and locate stationary ground targets using airborne sensors. These enabling technologies include: (1) distributed, cooperative control of UAVs, (2) a novel out-of-order sigma-point Kalman filtering method for local fusion of multi-view sensor data collected by different UAVs from varying perspectives, (3) a dynamic air-to-air and air-to-ground communication network, and (4) a UAV operating system to manage control, sensing, and communication activities. We illustrate the capabilities of this cooperative UAV system with test data acquired in flight demonstrations.