Research Summaries

Back Efficient Landing of Autonomous UAV Swarms on Multiple Moving Landing Platforms

Fiscal Year 2012
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Systems Engineering
Investigator(s) Dono, Thomas, F.
Sponsor Space & Naval Warfare Systems Center-Pacific (Navy)
Summary Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are growing in popularity and used for missions ranging from ISR collection to target prosecution. A near future operation may include the use of many such unmanned systems. These UAV swarms can be used for anything from attacking enemy targets to the defense of assets by enemy swarm attacks. In the current environment, multiple human operators are required to control a UAV during flight, even during routine operations such as recovery. As this technology grows with hundreds of UAVs in simultaneous operation, the goal will be for such missions to be led by as few operators as possible. The autonomous landing of these UAVs in an efficient and controlled manner is essential, since one human will be unable to effectively control that many assets at once. This project aims to develop behaviors and algorithms for each autonomous UAV that will allow it to land itself without direct control of an operator. The analysis and behavioral development will be investigated using approaches in queuing theory and agent based simulation tools. The project will compare various approach behaviors to a baseline mathematical queuing model to determine the efficiency of the
system. We will then take this information and expand it to modeling shipboard operations to see if we can simulate landing autonomous UAVs on multiple moving ships. Once these behaviors are realized in simulation they will then be tested on a small scale using actual UAVs at Camp Roberts, California.
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