MAGMA Mission Planner: Multi-Autonomous Ground/Multi-Air Unmanned Vehicle Collaboration

The goal of MAGMA Phase II is to develop and demonstrate significant capabilities in UGV-UAV collaboration and sentry operations to support dangerous urban infantry missions, such as building clearing. To accomplish this goal effectively, the iRobot team will rely on established architectures and message sets developed under the Overseer and Collaborative Engagement projects, and continue system interoperability with ARDEC’s Multiple Platform Collaboration architecture. We will advance the collaborative capabilities developed under Collaborative Engagement to enable coordinated sentry and surveillance operations. The technical objectives of MAGMA Phase II incude applying collaborative engagement capabilities that PackBot and Raven systems to provide joint tasks in building surveillance, tracking and geo-locating of a dismounted target in an urban environment. Objectives also include designing and implementing algorithms for PackBots to detect persons entering or exiting a building, as well as designing and implementing an OCU display of geo-referenced UAV images via a map interface. We propose a PackBot-Raven team to conduct sentry operations, including building surveillance and stakeout at points of exit/entry. While the Raven sends back visual data to the operator, the PackBot will independently be processing its own visual data, using its onboard algorithms to help determine which data may be of interest, and it will send an alert message to the operator. Together, these two channels of information, made easily accessible on a single OCU, will allow operators to apply their military expertise to decide what subsequent human actions and robotic tasks may be necessary.