Unmanned Vehicle System (UVS) Technology

Autonomous ground, air, and underwater vehicle technologies have matured to the level where they are useful for various tasks ranging from surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue operations, automated scientific data collection and hazardous materials handling. However, the capability for the unmanned vehicles to operate completely autonomously in real environments is still in its infancy. Advances in computing, sensor, and communications technology make it possible to achieve autonomous performance and coordination of these vehicles in uncertain environments.

TSi is leveraging our expertise in the areas of dynamic modeling, nonlinear filtering, advanced control systems design, wireless communications and system monitoring and prognostics to advance the state of the art in autonomous vehicle systems. We are also working closely with leading ground, aerial, and underwater autonomous vehicle manufacturers such as General Dynamics Robotic Systems , BAI Aerosystems, and Webb Research as well as manufacturers of innovative new sensor technologies such as Centeye and Multispectral Solutions and RealTronics.

Our first efforts are aimed at improved robustness and modularization of the vehicle control system including

•  Improved stability in adverse weather conditions. Existing UAVs, not unlike full size aircraft, have difficulty flying in bad weather. Even the multimillion dollar military UAVs are frequently grounded due to poor weather conditions. Improvement to the aircraft design and aggressive control is needed to enhance the limited operational envelope of these vehicles. Use of these vehicles in adverse weather conditions in turn protects human pilots from harsh flying conditions.

Our approach to modeling and control system shies away from traditional method of separation of longitudinal and lateral dynamics. We use six degree of freedom dynamics and kinematics to generate high performance and robust vehicle control systems that is capable of operation in varying flying conditions. This method has the added advantage of allowing integration of control design for several vehicle platforms under single approach.

•  Improved operational safety measures. Operation in other than military or extremely rural environments requires i mproved ability to continuously monitor the health of key UAV systems, combined with supervisory control authority enabling the vehicle to act on this information. For example, the ability to detect and compensate for actuator or sensor failures is crucial to increasing the safety of autonomous UAVs.

In addition, improved awareness of the environment with use of advanced sensors for is necessary to improve safety and for fully autonomous operation.

Our familiarity with the needs of the search and rescue community has lead us to focus our initial effort in this area. Techno-Sciences is aided by the fact that we are the largest provider of SARSAT ground equipment in the world. Several issues that are needed to be solved in order to field a completely autonomous search and rescue system are being addressed, these include:

• Development of algorithms for automatic generation of UAV search grids for the UAV fleet to ensure the fastest coverage without conflicts in airspace
• Improvements in UAV to UAV communications, as well as UAV to ground communications in order to be able to effectively coordinate the search effort
• Improvements in optical algorithms to ensure complete coverage of a search area Improvements in imaging algorithms for aiding the ground station team by detecting “potential” victims