Abstract: 

Multiple unmanned aerial vehicles (MUAVs) can provide significant reductions in manpower and risk to humans for Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance (ISR), including: enhancement of ISR coverage; increase in the mission success rate; increase of autonomy; robustness and benign degradation in performance. Using a swarm of UAVs has been receiving attention for a variety of applications to take advantage of its inherent flexibility and versatility. The focus of this talk is airborne monitoring of ground traffic behaviour by multiple UAVs in order to detect disguised threats and then to notify the human commander about the potentially dangerous vehicles. Within this traffic the most difficult challenge is to recognise behaviours of the potentially dangerous vehicles, disguised as legitimate traffic. Most of these activities of the dangerous vehicles are characterised by occasional deviations from motion characteristics of the legitimate traffic. For such ISR mission to be successful, the overall autonomy should be able to provide continuity of tracking of the vehicles of interest and thus enable positive identification of suspects. 

Biographical Note:

Antonios Tsourdos is a Professor of Autonomous Systems and Control Engineering and Director of Research – Aerospace, Transport and Manufacturing at Cranfield University. Professor Tsourdos received his PhD degree on nonlinear flight control by the Cranfield University in 1999. Professor Tsourdos was member of the Team Stellar, the winning team for the UK MoD Grand Challenge (2008) and the IET Innovation Award (Category Team, 2009). Professor Tsourdos is an editorial board member of the Proceedings of the  IMechE Part G Journal of Aerospace Engineering, the International Journal of Systems Science, the IEEE Transactions of Aerospace and Electronic Systems and the Aerospace Science & Technology. Professor Tsourdos is a vice-chair of the IFAC Technical Committees on Aerospace Control, and member of the IFAC Technical Committees on Intelligent Autonomous Vehicles, on Networked Systems and on Discrete Event and Hybrid Systems, the AIAA Technical Committee on Guidance, Control & Navigation (AIAA GNC TC) and the IEEE Control System Society Technical Committee on Aerospace Control (TCAC). Professor Tsourdos is also member of IET Robotics & Mechatronics Executive Team. Professor Tsourdos’s research interests include guidance and control of single and multiple vehicles, network decision systems, cyber-physical systems, multiple vehicle reasoning and integrated vehicle health management. He has published more than 200 papers and three books.

Prof. Antonios Tsourdos' homepage