A Distributed Architecture for Autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicle Experimentation

Abstract

The emerging area of intelligent unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) research has shown rapid development in recent years and offers a great number of research challenges for distributed autonomous robotics systems. In this article, a prototype distributed architecture for autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle experimentation is presented which supports the development of intelligent capabilities and their integration in a robust, scalable, plug-and-play hardware/software architecture. The architecture itself uses CORBA to support its infrastructure and it is based on a reactive concentric software control philosophy. A research prototype UAV system has been built, is operational and is being tested in actual missions over urban environments.