Advanced Research with Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles

Extended Abstract The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for artificial intelligence and knowledge representation. Much previous research has focused on low-level control capability with the goal of developing controllers which support the autonomous flight of a UAV from one way-point to another. The most common type of mission scenario involves placing sensor payloads in position for data collection tasks where the data is eventually processed off-line or in real-time by ground personnel. Use of UAVs and mission tasks such as these have become increasingly more important in recent conflict situations and are predicted to play increasingly more important roles in any future conflicts. Intelligent UAVs will play an equally important role in civil applications. For both military and civil applications, there is a desire to develop more sophisticated UAV platforms where the emphasis is placed on development of intelligent capabilities and on abilities to interact with human operators and additional robotic platforms. Focus in research has moved from low-level control towards a combination of low-level and decision-level control integrated in sophisticated software architectures. These in turn, should also integrate well with larger network-centric based CI systems. Such platforms are a prerequisite for supporting the capabilities required for the increasingly more complex mission tasks on the horizon and an ideal testbed for the development and integration of distributed AI technologies. The WITAS1 Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Project (Doherty et al. 2000) is a basic research project whose main objectives are the development of an integrated hardware/software VTOL (Vertical Take-Off and Landing) platform for fullyautonomous missions and its future deployment in applications such as traffic monitoring and surveillance, emergency