SUAV/SUGV Based Automated Geo-location and Hand-off

As the use of robotic vehicles, both ground and air, become more prevalent in today’s military, a crucial mission capability is vehicle collaboration for automated target geo-location, designation, and response. This SBIR effort proposes to research and develop core technologies that are required for collaborative missions between ground and air vehicles. These include the ability to communicate in a common framework, using both the JAUS and STANAG 4586 messaging standards, the identification and development of advanced algorithms and techniques to fuse, correlate, and prioritize sensor data acquired from multiple vehicle sources, and the design of intuitive operator displays to provide the most relevant information to the field commander in a clear, concise and non-overwhelming way to facilitate the decision making process. Several of these core technologies will be demonstrated using both a DP-6 VTOAL unmanned helicopter and a Talon robotic ground vehicle. The team of Dragonfly Pictures and Applied Perception bring unique capabilities in the fields of advanced unmanned air and unmanned ground vehicles. The work in this area will be a significant step forward towards the goal of truly autonomous multi-vehicle mission planning and collaboration.