Multi-Drone, Multi-Sensor Concept Research
Abstract
Dr. Ronald Driggers, Dr. Eddie Jacobs, and Dr. Chrysanthe Preza at the University of Memphis (UM) are requesting DURIP funds to augment a collaborative research effort with Army Research Laboratory (ARL) in the area of multiple Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) with multiple high-performance sensors. This collaborative effort will support the growing area of UAS proliferation as well as high performance sensor development. The combination of these two technologies provides a powerful battlefield situational awareness capability to support intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) as well as targeting. These capabilities can provide the detailed information to sort through high interest targets from decoys, surrogates, and camouflage, concealment, and deception (CCD). Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) or drones are proliferating at an unprecedented rate and are organic to the future of commerce as well as warfare. A multiple UAV suite of platforms and complementary orthogonal sensors can be configured to provide the most lethal scout capability to date. In this effort, wide area coverage, long range drones were configured with infrared and electro-optical sensors to detect and recognize targets with complementary sensors of acoustic, magnetic, electric field, vibrometry, and others mated with interrogation drones to discriminate decoys and clutter from real targets. This type of marriage between wide area coverage for detection and recognition coupled to other drones that can discriminate and interrogate targets provides a battlefield awareness that will provide the Army with an organic fighting capability and a complete understanding of the battlefield while increasing significantly lethality and survivability. Dr. Ronald DriggersÕ Infrared Systems Group will use this equipment in the development of sensing techniques for ISR and targeting applications with an emphasis on the discrimination of high interest targets from other less valuable targets to include decoys and CCD. Dr. Eddie JacobsÕ Autonomous Systems group will collaborate on the best use of the UAVs in such an ISR/targeting architecture to include ISR deployment, search and detection, and target discrimination. Emphasis will include aircraft and sensor integration, ground truth and field collection, testing and experimentation. Dr. Chrysanthe PrezaÕs Computational Imaging Systems Group will use data acquired with the equipment in the development of processing algorithms for battlefield understanding, sensor exploitation, target discrimination, and other military operations as needed (e.g., GPS denied navigation, degraded visual capabilities, etc). These efforts are in collaboration with ARL and includes ARL seed funding, ARL congressional requests with the UM, IMEC USA, and the UCF. Dr. DriggersÕ, Dr. JacobsÕ, and Dr. PrezaÕs research areas are largely involved in Department of Defense (DoD) applied research. Dr. DriggersÕ group only accepts US graduate students. The majority of Dr. JacobsÕ graduate students are US citizens and several of his former students have taken positions in DoD labs. This equipment can provide enough data to support between 5 and 8 doctoral students at the University of Memphis, IMEC USA, and the University of Central Florida. We expect to graduate between 1 and 2 doctoral students a year, where these students are highly qualified to work at DoD laboratories and warfare centers. This equipment request will support these activities in a way that will result in significant contributions to DoD.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Jun 25, 2021
- Source ID
- W911NF2110193
Entities
People
- Ronald Driggers
Organizations
- Army Contracting Command
- Office of the Secretary of Defense
- University of Memphis