Coordinated Search with a Swarm of UAVs

Search is a fundamental task for wilderness search and rescue that can greatly benefit from the use of a swarm of autonomous UAVs to survey the environment. The benefits are maximised if the UAVs coordinate their search activities with one another. In this poster, we present our preliminary work on developing coordination strategies for multiple UAVs. It is based on a distributed, grid-based probabilistic environmental model. We discuss the practicalities of the search task, present a simplified mathematical model of the environment and sensors, and present some preliminary simulation-based results. These clearly illustrate, even in a highly simplified case, the great benefits of coordinated search.