MIT researchers model automated UAV deployment
The market for UAVs is exploding, but critical issues remain about reliability and tactics; a team at MIT uses model helicopters to simulate a constant surveillance system that automatically switches UAVs in and out of the swarm for refueling and maintenace
The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) market is flying high these days, with experts projecting worldwide growth from $2 billion in 2005 to $4.5 billion in 2014, most within the United States. Yes, there have been set-backs, including the decision by DHS to select an SBInet plan by Boeing that minimized their use, but the long term trend is positive, as long as the technical and reliability issues are resolved. A team of students and professors at MIT (where else?) are doing their part with an ingenious method of modelling large scale UAV deployments. The idea is to find a way to maintain persistent surveillance over an area while switching UAVs in and out of the swarm for refueling and maintenace.
Despite MIT’s rich endowment, students on the UAV Swarm project do not have the luxury of experimenting with a flock of UAVs of their own. Yet nobody who knows anything about the MIT ethos would expect that small detail to get in their way. Instead they use remote control helicopters, each of which is controlled remotely by its own computer, which in turn receives general instructions from a single central machine. Programs include instructions requiring craft to return to a fueling station when running low while other UAVs automatically pick up the slack. “The focus of this project is on persistence,” said professor Jonathan How. “You don’t want 40 people on the ground operating 10 vehicles. The ultimate goal is to avoid a flight operator altogether.”
The MIT team has even managed to land its helicopters on a moving surface — a milestone in autonomous flight — by “monocular vision.” According to the New Scientist, “A video camera fastened to the UAV uses a visual ‘target’ to determine in real time the vehicle’s distance relative to the landing platform. The ground station then uses this information to compute commands that allow the UAV to land on the moving platform.” This may be just the thing to bring autonomous flight to the seas and to improve mobility on the ground.
Phantom Works, the research and development arm of Boeing, is a partner in the project.
-read more in this Technology News Daily report; see also this New Scientist report; UAV Swarm Web site
