Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year (2017-2018 to 2018-2019).

Humanitas Solutions is a Montreal-based company focusing on the development of innovative strategies forx000D
emergency and disaster assistance applications. As we recently witnessed with hurricane Irma, a natural orx000D
man-made disaster can leave behind destruction and debris of massive proportions, terrains that cannot bex000D
navigated and large areas without any functioning infrastructure. In such a scenario, the use of a fleet orx000D
possibly several fleets of small unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) flying over the area can provide valuablex000D
information to first responders, and for assistance over intermediate term. Some specific tasks that can bex000D
carried out by a UAV fleet include surveillance and information gathering, reconstruction of the map of thex000D
affected area for planning and managing the assistance, provision of aerial communication nodes to allowx000D
communication between the parties involved in the response operations, and transport of emergency suppliesx000D
and equipment. It is the latter that will be the focus of the joint project between McGill and Humanitas, asx000D
proposed in this application. Given the rather limited payload capacity of a single drone, typically on the orderx000D
of 1 kg, the task of transporting a heavier payload using several drones will be investigated in this project. In ax000D
disaster scenario, the payload may represent emergency medical and survival supplies or a piece of specializedx000D
equipment that can be shared between different aid groups. In particular, we will work towards demonstratingx000D
collaborative transport and delivery of a large payload using four multi-rotor UAVs. As part of this work, wex000D
will address a range of issues related to coordinated control and path planning for the drones, collisionx000D
avoidance between the drones themselves, as well as, between the fleet and payload on one hand and potentialx000D
obstacles in the environment on the other. We will work on defining and developing a specialized userx000D
interface to allow human supervision of the drones during this collaborative mission. All algorithms and toolsx000D
developed will be integrated with the software environment that is being developed by Humanitas as part of itsx000D
internal R&D efforts on UAV swarms.