In the future, the low-aerial space will be crowded by unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as the tendency is to make them increasingly smaller, smarter, and cheaper. Such peculiarities can open an unimaginable set of new applications thanks to the high flexibility and reconfigurability of UAVs. Nonetheless, the idea of having swarms of UAVs in future cities might be accepted with difficulty by the citizens because of their potential malicious use.
In this context, the overall goal of "AirSens" is to develop advanced radio signal processing techniques to be applied for high-accuracy tracking and sensing operations performed by UAVs, acting as distributed wireless sensor networks in mixed indoor/outdoor environments.
An example of considered scenario is an emergency situation in which UAVs constitute a temporary positioning infrastructure for mobile nodes located inside a building (e.g. firefighters). Another application of interest is the tracking of anomalous UAVs in critical safety areas. Going a step forward, one could easily imagine a setting where the UAVs enter a building with harsh propagation conditions, with many obstacles and a drastically reduced space for maneuvering. In this situation, UAVs should self-localize before being able to track users and to map the surrounding environment (infrastructure-less localization and mapping).
In all cases, the formation-navigation control of the UAV-swarm is based on the optimization of an information-theoretic cost function for seeking informative measurements and, hence, better estimating the parameters of interest.
To sum up, the main scientific objectives of "AirSens" are: (i) Analysis of the tracking performance using UAV-swarms; (ii) Assessment of the mapping performance of UAV-swarms; (iii) Control design and swarm intelligence algorithms.
By pursuing these objectives, AirSens deals with topics related to some of the societal challenges outlined by Horizon 2020, as for example:
(i) "Safety & Security". The swarm can be helpful for user guidance in unknown and dangerous environments. For example, in scarce visibility conditions, the swarm can guide rescuers in navigating buildings, or in rescuing human beings;
(ii) "Secure societies". The UAV swarm can be intended as “UAVs patrolling UAVs” and, thus, it can be useful for detecting and tracking malicious UAVs, especially in areas with potential safety issues, or it can be used in surveillance applications.
