Using heterogeneous multilevel swarms of UAVs and high-level data fusion to support situation management in surveillance scenarios

Abstract

The development and usage of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) quickly increased in the last decades, mainly for military purposes. This technology is also now of high interest in non-military contexts like logistics, environmental studies and different areas of civil protection. While the technology for operating a single UAV is rather mature, additional efforts are still necessary for using UAVs in fleets (or swarms). The Aid to SItuation Management based on MUltimodal, MUltiUAVs, MUltilevel acquisition Techniques (ASIMUT) project which is supported by the European Defence Agency (EDA) aims at investigating and demonstrating dedicated surveillance services based on fleets of UAVs. The aim is to enhance the situation awareness of an operator and to decrease his workload by providing support for the detection of threats based on multi-sensor multi-source data fusion. The operator is also supported by the combination of information delivered by the heterogeneous swarms of UAVs and by additional information extracted from intelligence databases. As a result, a distributed surveillance system increasing detection, high-level data fusion capabilities and UAV autonomy is proposed.