Groups of heterogeneous autonomous systems in area reconnaissance

Parallel deployment of heterogeneous autonomous assets as swarms or cooperating teams has become a realistic operational scenario nowadays. Especially in time-critical tasks (e.g. the search for missing persons, disaster relief and modern warfare operations) mass deployment of unmanned vehicles can be useful for obvious reasons. An important basis for efficient and effective autonomous reconnaissance or surveillance with an increasing task complexity or number of mobile vehicles is movement optimization considering the boundary conditions like vehicles or sensor capabilities. Special algorithms for such complex reconnaissance missions have been developed at Fraunhofer IOSB that enable fast appropriate planning and dynamic processing in very different situations with minimal effort of the operator. In the following, two reconnaissance methods are described in more detail and their possibilities are discussed and compared.