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

To conduct a target engagement, a team of autonomous unmanned air and ground vehicles will have to execute tasks of target pursuit and target tracking. The iRobot, CMU, and AeroVironment team is actively developing mission planning and collaborative teaming algorithms for a UAV-UGV team. For this project, we propose to expand the current team to double the number of participating UAVs and UGVs involved in a target engagement mission. Moreover, we aim to diversify the UGV set to include different but complementary UGV platforms that enable a wider range of capabilities for pursuit and tracking from the ground. The mission planning tools will be developed on a Supervisor Operator Control Unit to support mission monitoring, situational awareness and supervisory control for the operator. We lead the industry in our expertise of small UAV and UGV platforms as well as in advanced multi-robot coordination. The team has the collective knowledge and experience to develop practical near-term mission planning solutions and advanced collaborative UAV and UGV system teams.