Autonomous UAV Persistent Surveillance Using Bio-inspired Strategies

A team consisting of Teledyne Scientific Company, the University of California at Santa Barbara, the Army Research Laboratory, the Engineer Research and Development Center, and IBM UK is developing technologies in support of automated data exfiltration from heterogeneous battlefield sensor networks to enhance situational awareness for dismounts and command echelons. Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) provide an effective means to autonomously collect data from a sparse network of unattended ground sensors (UGSs) that cannot communicate with each other. UAVs are used to reduce the system reaction time by generating autonomous collection routes that are data-driven. Bioinspired techniques for autonomous search provide a novel strategy to detect, capture and fuse data from heterogeneous sensor networks. The bio-inspired algorithm is based on chemotaxis or the motion of bacteria seeking nutrients in their environment. Field tests of a bio-inspired system that routed UAVs were conducted in June 2011 at Camp Roberts, CA. The field test results showed that such a system can autonomously detect and locate the source of terrestrial events with very high accuracy and visually verify the event. In June 2011, field tests of the system were completed and include the use of multiple autonomously controlled UAVs, detection and disambiguation of multiple acoustic events occurring in short time frames, optimal sensor placement based on local phenomenology and the use of the International Technology Alliance (ITA) Sensor Network Fabric. The system demonstrated TRL 6 performance in the field at Camp Roberts.