Professor Karl Hedrick has been named Principal Investigator of a new ONR center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles. Co-PIs are Raja Sengupta and Tarek Zohdi.

The new center is part of the Office of Naval Research's AINS program (Autonomous Intelligent Networks and Sensors). The fundamental research thrust is to make UAV's and UGV's capable of self-directed collaborative navigation, i.e.,

• real-time avoidance of obstacles;
• collision avoidance with team members;
• coordinated flight in dynamically reconfigurable formations.

Based on this fundamental ability, a higher layer of Coordinated Team Control (CTC) that autonomously integrates teams of self-navigating platforms will be developed to execute the following missions:

• Rapid, real-time mapping of complex 3D environments;
• continuous distributed surveillance;
• on demand search and tracking;
• compact and cogent presentation (man/machine interface);
• compact linguistic and visual interface.

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In August 2003, teams from UC Berkeley, UCLA and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology demonstrated self-controlled - autonomous - planes and helicopters at the TIMPA airfield a few miles northwest of the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum. They were joined by Rep. Curt Weldon R-PA, vice chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. Click here for an article from the Tucson Citizen.

Professor Karl Hedrick, left; Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., second from right.