Event Location: NSH 1109
Bio: Michael is a Ph.D student at the Robotics Institute.

Abstract: Cooperative surveillance using teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a fruitful area of study given the many real-world applications and open research problems it offers. In this talk I will present our vision for such teams in an air-ground collaboration context using heterogeneous vehicles, with focus on the practical tasks that must be performed on the aerial side to accomplish such missions using commercially available camera-equipped UAVs. Proceeding through the pipeline of target designation, visual target tracking, UAV state filtering, and target geolocation, I will explore at each step the difficulties presented by the limited sensing available on such aircraft, examine existing and hypothetical methods for overcoming these, and provide examples from live data of our own implementations that address many such issues. Finally, I will conclude with a discussion of future directions, including strategies for distributed estimation and active control to reduce geolocation uncertainty of visible targets and to search for potential targets in both open and urban environments.