The Design of an Air-Ground Research Platform for Cooperative Surveillance

This report describes an unmanned systems architecture and platform for performing cooperative autonomy research. The primary research aim of this system is to explore distributed, cooperative, autonomy algorithms for controlling multiple unmanned systems vehicles. The system consists of multiple small, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and an Unmanned Ground Vehicle (UGV) that can operate autonomously and accept missions from a ground station. The system leverages open standards and off-the shelf technologies, and can be configured to carry different mission payloads. The vehicles communicate with each other and collaborate in a distributed manner. Real time telemetry and sensor updates are displayed on the FalconView based ground station. Over 60 flight demonstrations, as well as UAV-UGV collaborative experiments have been performed using this system.