MAV08 1st US-ASIA MAV conference and competition

”Coordination of MAVs and UGVs for Information - theoretic Urban Search and Rescue” Tomonari Furukawa ARC Centre of Excellence for Autonomous Systems School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering The University of New South Wales, NSW 2052 Australia [email protected]

This talk presents an information-theoretic control technique that coordinates Micro Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) for Urban Search and Rescue (USAR).

USAR missions are concerned with the state estimation of various

static and dynamic targets such as victims to search for and rescue and enemies to capture or escape where their information is often partially available. The technique, unlike the traditional area coverage and tracking techniques, can utilize any available information including prior knowledge and empirical knowledge and effectively estimates the target states in the form of probability density function (PDF).

The use of a

nonlinear recursive Bayesian estimator further enables the estimation of a non-Gaussian PDF of a nonlinear system and thus the search, which results in a highly non-Gaussian PDF due to the use of the negative observation likelihood, as well as the tracking. The independent node wise computation in the nonlinear recursive Bayesian estimation (RBE) also allows its implementation into a parallel computer including the graphical processing unit, making the real-time RBE possible irrespective of the number of vehicles to coordinate. The preliminary numerical investigations show successful implementation through validation and verification as well as real-time performance even when the number of nodes used for RBE exceeds one million. The proposed technique was further used for the RBE by a team of rotary-wing MAV and UGVs each equipped with a GPS and a compass to identify its global state, a camera to detect a target and a wireless module to communicate with the ground station. Although the ground to search for a target

was vast and thus made the number of nodes considerably large, the proposed technique could execute real-time RBE while the MAVs and UGVs were cooperatively observing

MAV08 1st US-ASIA MAV conference and competition

the ground.

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