Human Assisted UAV-UGV Cooperative Tracking of Urban Dismounts

A new set of technologies must be developed to enable UAVs to collaborate with UGVs and cooperatively search, detect, track, and ID elusive humans operating in complex urban settings. SET Corporation, a world leader in sensor exploitation and human signature analysis, proposes to develop a refined urban tracking CONOPS and to synthesize an advanced system design for human-assisted cooperative UAV-UGV tracking. Critical technology innovations in active sensor manipulation, pose-invariant human target verification, and adaptive modeling will enable entirely new capabilities in pervasive sensing and persistent tracking of human targets. Feasibility analyses and risk reduction studies will be used to confirm the viability of our Phase II plan for development and demonstration. SET has teamed with Brigham Young University, a leader in autonomous air vehicle technology and multi-vehicle cooperative control. BYU’s UAV / UGV testbed provides a unique opportunity for rapid prototyping of candidate architectures and real world data collection. Together, SET and BYU’s expertise span the full scope of technologies required to develop tightly-coupled on board sensing, tracking, and control algorithms that allow a small UAV and small UGV to cooperatively track an elusive dismount through spatially complex urban clutter.