Mission planning and simulation of unmanned aerial vehicles with a GIS-based framework

Mission Planning software uses Geographic Information Systems (GIS) sources and dynamic aggregation of geo-referenced data to provide an information-rich context for human-directed creation of missions that are, for the most part, vehicle-independent. This requires a connection between the universal Mission Planner and an heterogeneous groups of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), payloads and associated software tools. The developed abstraction mechanism is the Aerial Vehicle Control Language (AVCL), in which the missions are expressed. The ultimate goal is the easy integration of vehicles developed by different research groups with existing systems. It has been tested with our real-time small helicopter simulator.