Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

The rapidly growing deployments and developments of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have highlightedthe power of such systems for monitoring, national security, surveillance, reconnaissance, and search andrescue 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 forreducing illegal immigration, the threat of terrorism and maritime surveillance for reducing illegal fishing andimmigration, and the threat of terrorism. In recognition of the importance and advantages of using UAVs forthe above civil and military applications, considerable efforts have been launched recently worldwide fordevelopment of efficient, reliable and lower cost UAV systems.In Canada, the safety and security requirements along the northern border and the eastern and western coastlead naturally to the need of using UAVs for homeland security missions, in particular in view of the severeenvironmental conditions in northern border. To provide realistic solutions to the above safety and securitychallenges and to the public safety, this project aims at developing a cooperative UAV system with increasedreliability for operations in safety- and security-critical missions. The proposed project will result in a multiplecooperating UAV system to carry out a thorough investigation of health monitoring and fault-tolerantcooperative control of UAV fleets for increased reliability in severe environments. The technology beingdeveloped in this project is expected to be a key enabler of homeland security missions, for applications innorth border patrol and coastline surveillance, and of public safety relevant to the forest fires monitoring andsurveillance of oil fields, pipelines, electric lines and nuclear power plants, to name just a few. As a result ofthis research effort, the safety and security of Canada will significantly benefit from the envisagedtechnological advances.