Collaboration between Multiple Unmanned Vehicles for Increased Mission Efficiency

As the use of unmanned vehicles is increasing, cost effective operation requires collaboration between multiple vehicles. Such collaboration has many advantages such as the ability to handle more complex task, ability to tackle a task with increased robustness through redundancy, increased efficiency through task distribution, and reduced cost of operation. The main problem is to efficiently distribute the payloads and coordinate the actions of the vehicles so that each vehicle arrives at the desired location at an appropriate time. This requires control of individual vehicle and complex network of communication among the vehicles and between the vehicles and the Operator Control Unit which displays position and orientation of each vehicle in the team and alerts the operator of any anomalies in the health of the vehicles and safety of operations. Cal Poly Pomona is currently working on a project that involves two unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and one unmanned ground vehicle (UGV). The coordination between the vehicles has been successfully tested for search and rescue type missions. One UAV airplane was used for target identification and the determination of the target location. The second UAV, equipped with rescue package drop mechanism, received the target location from the first UAV and autonomously flew toward the target location. Based on the position of the target relative to the UAV, the flight management computer calculated the release point and autonomously triggered the release of the rescue package. The ground vehicle, which also received the target location from the first UAV, then travelled to the target location autonomously for the confirmation of the package delivery. The same concept can be extended to other military and civilian applications. This paper presents the overall architecture, concept of operations, autonomous navigation of the UAVs and UGV, target acquisition and processing, communication system, and experimental results.