Mission management for unmanned aircraft systems

Abstract

A Mission Manager brings flexibility, optimization and autonomy to a mission with unmanned aircraft vehicles (UAV). It is in charge of interacting with the Flight and Payload Categories to coordinate the mission. For achieving it, it executes an automaton with attached actions. It works conjunctly with a Mission Monitor, a union called Mission Category, to reduce the human-machine interaction during the flight. Furthermore, its benefits go beyond the day of the mission, as the Mission Category reuses efforts to reduce the mission designing time. This project has the express objective of designing and implementing these two main parts of the Mission Category of a UPC-ICARUS project called Sky-Eye. The ICARUS group is located in the Mediterranean Technology Park in Castelldefels and is basically formed by researchers of the UPC and some of their students. Sky-Eye is a project subsidized for the Government of Catalonia for designing a post-fire inspection UAS mission. In order to achieve its objectives, this final degree project has researched the State of Art of the Sky-Eye project, it has made a proposal of design of the Mission part, it has developed it and finally it has tested its performances with simulations with the Categories that are currently being used on the project. The results obtained might be considered excellent because the main parts of the Mission Category have been introduced in the Sky-Eye’s project and they fulfil all the main objectives of the Category. As a result, after this Final Degree Project, the Payload Category is optimized and operated taking into account the user needs. For its part, the Flight Category is now automatically updated according to the changing mission circumstances. Moreover, it has been added some extra functionalities that provides extra value to this project, like the possibility of planning a mission before the actuation.