Swarms with Autonomous Pinniped Homing Over Nasty Environments (SOUSAPHONE)

Small unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) play a critical and growing role in government, military,
commercial, and scientific operations across a range of missions such as weather monitoring, natural disaster assessment, surveillance, and infrastructure inspection. Their versatility, maneuverability, and dependability, coupled with their ability to keep operators out of harm’s way, make them critical assets in a wide range of domains, but especially so in dangerous, dynamic, and unpredictable environments. For UAS to operate reliably and effectively among other aircraft, replace manned aircraft on missions, and enable effective beyond visual line of sight (BVLOS) operations, new capabilities are needed. Charles River proposes to implement a concept design, develop a prototype system, and conduct limited risk reduction experiments for Ship-based Operations for UAS Swarms with Autonomous Pinniped Homing Over Nasty Environments (SOUSAPHONE). SOUSAPHONE is an aircraft and autopilot agnostic software framework that enables multiple ship-launched UAS to safely coordinate semi-autonomous BVLOS wildlife survey operations (e.g., for pinnipeds) using advanced artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML)-based computer vision and relative navigation techniques in challenging environments, such as the Alaskan Arctic.