Cooperative Tracking of Moving Targets by Teams of Autonomous Unmanned Air Vehicles

The goal of the proposed work is to rapidly evaluate, and demonstrate in flight, algorithms for cooperative tracking of moving targets using multiple UAVs. The building block algorithms have been maturing through sponsorship elsewhere, and the timing is crucial to now pull them together for demonstration and commercialization. Phase I will involve simulation and flight demonstration of the building blocks. Phase II will involve an end-to-end Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) simulation and a set of comprehensive flight experiments of the integrated system. The Insitu ScanEagle/Seascan is the smallest fixed-wing UAV that can be used for target tracking as it is the smallest UAV that has an inertially stabilized and gimbaled turret. ScanEagle has demonstrated in-flight the ability to autonomously track moving targets for short periods of time. The goal of this research is to combine the latest methods being developed at the University of Washington, Cornell, and Insitu into the current framework. The project goal is to enable a swarm of UAVs to track a moving, evading target for up to 30 minutes without human intervention.