Mission Health Management for 24/7 Persistent Surveillance Operations

This paper presents the development and implementation of techniques used to manage autonomous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) performing 24/7 persistent surveillance operations. Using an indoor flight testbed, flight test results are provided to demonstrate the complex issues encountered by operators and mission managers when executing an extended persistent surveillance operation in realtime. This paper presents mission health monitors aimed at identifying and improving mission system performance to avoid down time, increase mission system efficiency and reduce operator loading. This paper discusses the infrastructure needed to execute an autonomous persistent surveillance operation and presents flight test results from one of our recent automated UAV recharging experiments. Using the RAVEN at MIT, we present flight test results from a 24 hr, fully-autonomous air vehicle flight-recharge test and an autonomous, multi-vehicle extended mission test using small, electric-powered air vehicles.