(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2015-05-15)
Christmann, Hans Claus
With the achievement of autonomous flight for small unmanned aircraft, currently
ongoing research is expanding the capabilities of systems utilizing such
vehicles for various tasks. This allows shifting the research focus from the
individual systems to task execution benefits resulting from interaction and
collaboration of several aircraft.
Given that some available high-fidelity simulations do not yet support
multi-vehicle scenarios, the presented work introduces a framework which allows
several individual single-vehicle simulations to be combined into a larger
multi-vehicle scenario with little to no special requirements towards the
single-vehicle systems. The created multi-vehicle system offers real-time
software-in-the-loop simulations of swarms of vehicles across multiple hosts and
enables a single operator to command and control a swarm of unmanned aircraft
beyond line-of-sight in geometrically correct two-dimensional cluttered
environments through a multi-hop network of data-relaying intermediaries.
This dissertation presents the main aspects of the developed system: the
underlying software framework and application programming interface, the
utilized inter- and intra-system communication architecture, the graphical user
interface, and implemented algorithms and operator aid heuristics to support the
management and placement of the vehicles. The effectiveness of the aid
heuristics is validated through a human subject study which showed that the
provided operator support systems significantly improve the operators'
performance in a simulated first responder scenario.
The presented software is released under the Apache License 2.0 and, where
non-open-source parts are used, software packages with free academic licenses
have been chosen--resulting in a framework that is completely free for academic
research.
(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2008-04-01)
Christmann, Hans Claus
Currently there is ongoing research in the field of Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANET) for several different scenarios. Research has focused on topology related challenges such as routing
mechanisms or addressing systems, as well as security issues like traceability of radio communication or encryption. In addition, there
are very specific research interests such as the effects of directional antennas for MANETs or optimized transmission techniques for minimal
power consumption or range optimization.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and unmanned aerial systems (UAS) in general, need wireless systems in order to communicate. Current UAS are
very flexible and allow for a wide spectrum of mission profiles by means of utilizing different UAVs, according to the requirements at hand. Each
mission poses special needs and requirements on the internal and external UAS communication and special mission scenarios calling for UAV
swarms increase the complexity and require specialized communication solutions.
UAS have specific needs not provided by the general research, but are, on the other hand, to diversified to make much use of narrowly
focused developments; UAS form a sufficiently large research area for application of MANETs to be considered as an independent group with
specialized needs worthy of tailored implementations of MANET principles. MANET research has not tackled a general approach to UAS
although some sources show specific applications involving UAVS.
This work presents some new aspects for the development of of ad-hoc wireless networks for UAVs and UAS and focuses on their specialties and
needs. A general framework for MANET development is proposed. Furthermore, the proposed specific evaluation scenarios provide for a UAS focused comparison of MANET performance.