Research Summaries

Back Modeling, Simulation, and Systems Integration for Swarm Search and Rescue

Fiscal Year 2015
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Systems Engineering
Investigator(s) Chung, Timothy H.
Sponsor Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DoD)
Summary This proposed effort investigates the employment of large teams of aerial sensing robots to cooperatively conduct multi-faceted, wide area Search and Rescue (SAR) missions, with extension s to surveillance and patrol capabilities. The employment of swarms of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offers significant potential search capabilities due to their expanded coverage, ability to mitigate false positive and false negative detections, and cutting-edge advances in swarm algorithms and cooperative sensing models. This research and development initiative proposes analytic and simulation-based study and design of swarm missions, specifically highlighting new technological and tactical capabilities addressing current Search and Rescue mission sets. Characterization of the proposed swarm employment includes study in the context of a homogeneous sensing swarm (i.e., all UAVs equipped with identical sensor payloads) and its heterogeneous counterpart (i.e., different UAVs are equipped with one or more different sensing modalities). This proposed research also identifies trade spaces between the numbers of swarm elements, their (potentially non-deterministic) spatial and temporal distribution, allocation of different sensors, and the required coordination among the swarm agents for enhanced search mission effectiveness. This effort largely relies on integration with high fidelity 3D simulation environments to accelerate and assess the performance of existing and novel swarm search algorithms.
Keywords
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal