Collaborative microdrones: applications and research challenges

ABSTRACT

Microdrones are small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) carrying payloads such as cameras and sensors. Such microdrones enable us to obtain a bird's eye view of the environment which is helpful in many applications such as environmental monitoring, surveillance or disaster management.

This position paper reports on our recently launched project "collaborative microdrones" where we are developing a system for aerial imaging based on cooperating, wireless networked microdrones that can be used in disaster management applications. Several microdrones will fly in formation over the area of interest and deliver sensor data which is fused, analyzed and delivered to the user in real-time. In this paper we briefly discuss applications for UAVs, present related projects, introduce our research focus and report on preliminary results.

REFERENCES

• 1: European Civil Unmanned Air Vehicle Roadmap 3 - Strategic Research Agenda, 2005.
• 2: S. Ali and M. Shah. COCOA: tracking in aerial imagery. In D. J. Henry, editor, Airborne Intelligence, Surveillance, Reconnaissance (ISR) Systems and Applications III, volume 6209. SPIE, 2006.
• 3: M. Bicego, S. Dalfini, and V. Murino. Extraction of geographical entities from aerial images. In Remote Sensing and Data Fusion over Urban Areas, 2003. 2nd GRSS/ISPRS Joint Workshop on, pages 125--128, 2003.
• 4: Jeffrey S. Cox , Edmund H. Durfee , Thomas Bartold, A distributed framework for solving the Multiagent Plan Coordination Problem, Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, July 25-29, 2005, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1082473.1082598]
• 5: P. Doherty, G. Granlund, K. Kuchcinski, E. Sandewall, K. Nordberg, E. Skarman, and J. Wiklund. TheWITAS Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Project. In W. Horn (ed.): ECAI 2000. Proceedings of the 14th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence, IOS Press, Amsterdam, 2000.
• 6: E. H. Durfee. Multiagent Systems. A Modern Approach to Distributed Artificial Intelligence, chapter Distributed Problem Solving and Planning. MIT Press, 2000.
• 7: J. Gancet, G. Hattenberger, R. Alami, and S. Lacroix. Task planning and control for a multi-UAV system: architecture and algorithms. In Intelligent Robots and Systems, 2005. (IROS 2005). 2005 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on, pages 1017--1022, 2005.
• 8: G. Hoffmann, D. Rajnarayan, S. Waslander, D. Dostal, J. J. S., and C. Tomlin. The Stanford Testbed of Autonomous Rotorcraft for Multi-Agent Control. In the Digital Avionics System Conference 2004, Salt Lake City, 2004.
• 9: J. How, B. Bethke, A. Frank, D. Dale, and J. Vian. Real-Time Indoor Autonomous Vehicle Test Environment. IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 2008.
• 10: Y. Lin and G. Medioni. Map-Enhanced UAV Image Sequence Registration and Synchronization of Multiple Image Sequences. In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Conference on Pattern Recognition and Computer Vision, Minneapolis, USA, June 2007.
• 11: L. Merino, F. Caballero, J. M. de Dios, and A. Ollero. Cooperative Fire Detection using Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. In Proceedings of the 2005 IEEE, IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, Barcelona (Spain), Apr. 2005.
• 12: L. Merino, R. Martinez, and A. Ollero. Cooperative perception for fire monitoring. In International Symposium on Robotics and Applications (ISORA), World Automation Congress (WAC 2004), Seville (Spain), June 2004.
• 13: Roberto Micalizio , Pietro Torasso , Gianluca Torta, On-line monitoring and diagnosis of a team of service robots: A model-based approach, AI Communications, v.19 n.4, p.313-340, December 2006
• 14: A. Ollero, G. Hommel, J. Gancet, L.-G. Gutierrez, D. Viegas, P.-E. Forsson, and M. Gonzalez. COMETS: A multiple heterogeneous UAV system. In IEEE International Workshop on Safety, Security and Rescue Robotics (SSRR 2004)/fie, Bonn (Germany), May 2004.
• 15: X. Perrotton, M. Sturzel, and M. Roux. Automatic object detection on aerial images using local descriptors and image synthesis. In Computer Vision Systems, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pages 302--311. Springer Berlin/Heidelberg, 2008.
• 16: M. Persson, M. Sandvall, and T. Duckett. Automatic building detection from aerial images for mobile robot mapping. In Computational Intelligence in Robotics and Automation, 2005. CIRA 2005. Proceedings. 2005 IEEE International Symposium on, pages 273--278, 2005.
• 17: A. Ryan, M. Zennaro, A. Howell, R. Sengupta, and J. K. Hedrick. An Overview of Emerging Results in Cooperative UAV Control. In Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE International Conference on Decision and Control, pages 602--607, Atlantis, Bahamas, 2004.
• 18: Yaser Sheikh , Mubarak Shah, Object Tracking across Multiple Independently Moving Aerial Cameras, Proceedings of the Tenth IEEE International Conference on Computer Vision, p.1555-1560, October 17-20, 2005 [doi>10.1109/ICCV.2005.174]
• 19: Yaser Ajmal Sheikh , Mubarak Shah, Trajectory Association across Multiple Airborne Cameras, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, v.30 n.2, p.361-367, February 2008 [doi>10.1109/TPAMI.2007.70750]
• 20: M. Tabbara, D. Nesic, and A. Teel. Stability of wireless and wireline networked control systems. IEEE Transactions on Automatic Control, 52(9):1615--1630, Sept. 2007.
• 21: Roman van der Krogt , Mathijs de Weerdt , Cees Witteveen, A resource based framework for planning and replanning, Web Intelligence and Agent Systems, v.1 n.3-4, p.173-186, December 2003
• 22: Patrick Vincent , Izhak Rubin, A framework and analysis for cooperative search using UAV swarms, Proceedings of the 2004 ACM symposium on Applied computing, March 14-17, 2004, Nicosia, Cyprus [doi>10.1145/967900.967919]
• 23: X. Wang, V. Yadav, and S. N. Balakrishnan. Cooperative UAV Formation Flying With Obstacle/Collision Avoidance. IEEE Spectrum, 15(4):672--679, July 2007.
• 24: Cees Witteveen , Nico Roos , Roman van der Krogt , Mathijs de Weerdt, Diagnosis of single and multi-agent plans, Proceedings of the fourth international joint conference on Autonomous agents and multiagent systems, July 25-29, 2005, The Netherlands [doi>10.1145/1082473.1082596]
• 25: W. Zhang, M. Branicky, and S. Phillips. Stability of networked control systems. IEEE Control Systems Magazine, 21(1):84--99, Feb. 2001.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  C. Computer Systems Organization
  C.3 SPECIAL-PURPOSE AND APPLICATION-BASED SYSTEMS

Additional Classification:
  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
  I.4 IMAGE PROCESSING AND COMPUTER VISION

Keywords:
aerial imaging, formation flight, microdrones, mission planning, networked autonomous systems