A Ground Control Station for a Multi-UAV Surveillance System: Design and Validation in Field Experiments

摘要

This paper presents the ground control station developed for a platform composed by multiple unmanned aerial vehicles for surveillance missions. The software application is fully based on open source libraries and it has been designed as a robust and decentralized system. It allows the operator to dynamically allocate different tasks to the UAVs and to show their operational information in a 3D realistic environment in real time. The ground control station has been designed to assist the operator in the challenging task of managing a system with multiple UAVs, trying to reduce his workload. The multi-UAV surveillance system has been demonstrated in field experiments using two quadrotors equipped with visual cameras.