Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The rapidly growing deployments and developments of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have highlighted the power of such systems for monitoring, national security, surveillance, reconnaissance, and search and rescue tasks. Envisaged civilian applications include monitoring forest fires, earthquakes, volcanoes, oil fields, pipelines and nuclear power plants. Potential applications to homeland security include border patrol for reducing illegal immigration, the threat of terrorism and maritime surveillance for reducing illegal fishing and immigration, and the threat of terrorism. In recognition of the importance and advantages of using UAVs for the above civil and military applications, considerable efforts have been launched recently worldwide for development of efficient, reliable and lower cost UAV systems. In Canada, the safety and security requirements along the northern border and the eastern and western coast lead naturally to the need of using UAVs for homeland security missions, in particular in view of the severe environmental conditions in northern border. To provide realistic solutions to the above safety and security challenges and to the public safety, this project aims at developing a cooperative UAV system with increased reliability for operations in safety- and security-critical missions. The proposed project will result in a multiple cooperating UAV system to carry out a thorough investigation of health monitoring and fault-tolerant cooperative control of UAV fleets for increased reliability in severe environments. The technology being developed in this project is expected to be a key enabler of homeland security missions, for applications in north border patrol and coastline surveillance, and of public safety relevant to the forest fires monitoring and surveillance of oil fields, pipelines, electric lines and nuclear power plants, to name just a few. As a result of this research effort, the safety and security of Canada will significantly benefit from the envisaged technological advances.