Latest ideas in brief

In light of the continuing plans for the Mosaic project (check out the new website here) I've been trying to flesh out more of an idea for what I can contribute to this field in the coming years. Thankfully with confirmation from my supervisors that it's not a stupid idea (always worth knowing!) I'm beginning to build more of a concrete plan of what I can (at least try) to implement.

Mosaic project logo. Not representative of our choice of UAVs...

The logic behind it:
It looks very much like the Mosaic demonstrator we're planning for next summer will consist of heterogenous UAVs: specifically fixed wing gliders and some form of 'copters. Given that these clearly have very different capabilities, speeds, durations in the air etc; how best can they act as a team to find the targets in a space? There has been work on this area already, specifically in coalition formation, but there doesn't seem to be much emphasis on a message-passing hierarchy between different forms of UAV. The kind of example I envisage is where a high-level glider does a few passes over a search area and generates some initial guesses for locations of search-objects (in real life, these might be casualties), before passing this on to the lower-level 'copters to deal with in some way, perhaps as a max-sum task allocation since the framework for this already exists. In a non-discretised case, where perhaps it would be best not to treat individual locations as point-like tasks, I'd also be interested in using rapidly-exploring random trees as a basis for working out optimal routes over a probability map produced by the glider to maximise some utility in finding objects.

Animation of a rapidly-exploring random tree. After growth is complete the UAV can pick an optimal path to follow.

Well that's the summary. Now comes the hard part of making all of this actually tenable! Back to work...