Collaborative Microdrones

Acronym: cDrones
Start:  04.2008
End:    12.2011

Abstract
Microdrones are small-scale unmanned aerial vehicles (so called Quadrocopter's) carrying payloads such as cameras and sensors. This project develops a system
for aerial sensing based on cooperating, wireless networked microdrones. Several microdrones will fly in formation over the area of interest in a self-organizing manner and deliver high-quality sensor data such as images or videos. These images are fused on the ground, analysed in real-time, and delivered to the user.

Overview information
Having access to a bird eye's view over large areas is helpful in many applications, for instance, in disaster and law-enforcement situations, where often only in-
complete and inconsistent information is available to the rescue or police team.
In such situations, airborne cameras and sensors are valuable sources of information helping us to build an "overview" of the environment and to assess the current situation.

Key technologie
The proposed project aims at advancing the current state-of-the-art in the domain of collaborative microdrones. We will develop algorithms, concepts, and methods for three key technological areas:

• Flight formation
  How do several microdrones - flying in the air - establish and maintain in a self-organizing manner a given formation pattern? How do they change from one formation pattern to another? How to cope with failures of microdrones?

• Mission planning and control
  How to plan and control a cooperative microdrone mission for a task given by a user of the system? How to develop methods which optimize the overall behavior of the UAV formation to meet the mission goals? How to react dynamically to unpredictable dynamics of the environment?

• Sensor data interpretation
  How to explore the capabilities of fusing and interpreting data from multiple sensors under tight resource limitations onboard of the distributed microdrones and on the centralized ground station, respectively? How to perform feedback loops of sensor data interpretation for the other two areas?

Although the developed technology should be of general applicability, we will focus on the applicability of networked microdrones to fire rescue scenarios. The use of (isolated) microdrones in this domain will offer a very valuable help for fire fighters.

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