Today's battlefield is becoming increasingly autonomous. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have already seen combat - robots may well be the future of warfare. The Battlespace Autonomous Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (BAUUV) is a research project undertaken by SciSys which models low-powered cooperative autonomous submarines using airships.
The project encompasses state of the art technologies in "swarms" of vehicles - much of it from SciSys' extensive experience of developing multiple spacecraft systems for the European Space Agency (ESA).
Building on the experienced gained in developing multiple spacecraft simulators, cooperative guidance systems, distributed avionics architectures and embedded software, a demonstration model was developed. From that model, the software was autocoded and flown on-board a group of autonomous airships.
The autonomous airships provided a useful demonstration of the vehicle interactions in all three dimensions. A number of missions were evaluated and flown demonstrating key cooperative aspects such as meeting common objectives and collision avoidance. The operational target date is scheduled for 2015.
