Search Pattern Evaluation for UV Sensor Suites

The nature of co-operating Uninhabited Vehicle (UV) systems is such that performance enhancements are likely to be a result of greatly increased system complexity. This complexity emerges through the interaction of multiple autonomous UVs, and hence presents a fundamental challenge in the effective deployment of UV systems. Because of the very nature of the advantage of these systems, they are hard to specify, design and evaluate. Lack of understanding of these most fundamental issues is driving research into co-operative UV systems, with a view to discovering widely applicable system design rules that may be used to guide UV system development in the future. In order to properly understand how collective and emergent behaviour arises in autonomous UVs, a level of modelling is required which focuses on the interactions between individual UV systems. This paper reports on the development of a new simulation framework that addresses these issues and allows novel algorithms to be created and assessed. A set of example algorithms have been developed and analysed using the framework and are reported in the paper. The first considers a distributed array of ground-based sensors which fall into the category of ‘disposable’ sensors, where limited performance, weight, size and cost are key. This clearly limits the endurance of such sensors quite dramatically. The second example chosen is perhaps more traditional and is based upon a small group of airborne UVs whose mission is to search a neighbourhood as efficiently as possible.