RISCuer: A Reliable Multi-UAV Search and Rescue Testbed

TL;DR

This paper introduces RISCuer, a multi-UAV testbed for reliable outdoor search, rescue, and object transport, demonstrating autonomous coordination, vision-based detection, and onboard computation through extensive outdoor experiments.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel multi-UAV system with onboard processing, cooperative strategies, and a comprehensive hardware-software architecture for outdoor search and rescue tasks.

Findings

Successful outdoor experiments demonstrating reliable UAV coordination

Effective vision-based object detection and localization

Safe autonomous object transport with conflict prevention

Abstract

We present the Robotics Intelligent Systems & Control (RISC) Lab multiagent testbed for reliable search and rescue and aerial transport in outdoor environments. The system consists of a team of three multirotor unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), which are capable of autonomously searching, picking up, and transporting randomly distributed objects in an outdoor field. The method involves vision based object detection and localization, passive aerial grasping with our novel design, GPS based UAV navigation, and safe release of the objects at the drop zone. Our cooperative strategy ensures safe spatial separation between UAVs at all times and we prevent any conflicts at the drop zone using communication enabled consensus. All computation is performed onboard each UAV. We describe the complete software and hardware architecture for the system and demonstrate its reliable performance using comprehensive outdoor experiments, and by comparing our results with some recent, similar works.