Demo Abstract: R.A.V.E.N. – Remote Autonomous Vehicle Explorer Network

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) have recently become a viable platform for surveillance and exploration tasks. Several commercial quadrotor aircraft have been successfully used as surveillance equipment with groups such as United States and Canadian police forces, and additional applications for this technology could include exploration of ra-dioactive/hazmat environments, naval search and rescue, or surveying a building on fire, to name a few. Despite the agility and speed of the quadrotor platform, current systems lack the redundancy and collaboration of a multi-unit team; current implementations of quadrotor UAV flocks require expensive equipment, limiting the system to operation within range of external sensors. We propose a system for intelligently controlling multiple quadrotor UAVs using a combination of on-board vision tracking and wireless communication of attitude measurements. The proposed system uses a lead, human-controlled quadrotor and one or more quadro-tors that track and follow the lead unit autonomously. The forthcoming system aims to improve the execution time required to complete missions and increase both breadth of search and platform effectiveness.