UAV-Assisted Ad Hoc Networks for Crisis Management and Hostile Environment Sensing – ANCHORS

The ANCHORS project aims to develop a crisis management system which integrates intervening personal, unmanned aerial vehicles, ground robots and a communication system which is based on a hybrid cellular and ad-hoc architecture. It can be seen as an “umbrella project” incorporating and evolving the interdisciplinary approaches in communication, unmanned systems, embedded devices, sensors and software development. Additionally to the envisaged holistic system-of-systems approach ANCHORS will endeavour to the scientific supreme discipline by providing novel experimental, simulative, analytical concepts and solutions in each research area.
In order to guarantee the relevance of the developed concepts, the project includes final user as full partners and the whole French-German consortium is lead by a fire brigades institution.
The project will address several thematics that are related to crisis management and more specifically to nuclear hazard incidents, the focus will be made on the aspects related to wireless communications, environment measurement and equipment control.
For data measurement aspects, the project will develop and design a sensor array for air-bound and ground-bound detection of radioactive or nuclear material by means of a swarm of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV). The project aims to enhance the performance of these sensors in terms of sensitivity, energy consumption, and radionuclide identification. Since, the project relies on an intensive use of unmanned aerial vehicles; a significant part of the work will be dedicated to enhance these engines. The work will focus on the development and the implementation of a robust UAVs fulfilling the operational requirements. This includes specification of the used systems, UAV, possible additional flight platform for longer relay distances and the integration of UGVs, protection against radiation, energy optimization, a health management system including autonomous landing and recharging on the UGV and a mission control system.
In all crisis management systems, communication is always is a critical aspect. That’s why; the project will commit a considerable amount of resources in order to develop a communication infrastructure for both rescue sub-system and sensors/robots sub-system. These sub-systems require robust and reliable communication modes in order to transfer multi-media streams, measurement data, messages and commands between individuals, vehicles and devices (sensors, robots). The work will focus on the specification of a hybrid ad-hoc and cellular architecture and will design specific communication nodes to be embedded in the UAVs. These nodes will operate as coordinators for and also as backup relays for the other communication equipments.
In order to allow an autonomous deployment of UAVs, innovative methods and algorithms for the cooperative behaviour of single autonomous entities will be investigated and implemented. This includes communication protocols for the exchange between the team members as well as mobility and team working algorithms. For the fulfilment of the overall mission goal the team has to fulfil specific tasks while simultaneously maintaining connectivity to the other participants in the system
Besides technical research, dedicated work will focus on the definition of relevant scenarios. Also specific tasks will be dedicated to the development of a demonstrator which validates the integration of the concepts that are developed by all the technical studies.