SUAVE: Integrating UAV video using a 3D model

Controlling a team of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) requires the operator to perform continuous surveillance and path planning. The operator's situation awareness is likely to degrade as an increasing number of surveillance videos must be viewed and integrated. The Picture-in-Picture display (PiP) provides one solution for integrating multiple UAV camera video by allowing the operator to view the video feed in the context of surrounding terrain. The experimental SUAVE (Simple Unmanned Areal Vehicle Environment) display extends PiP methods by sampling imagery from the video stream to texture a 3D map of the terrain. The operator can then inspect this imagery using world in miniature (WIM) or fly-through methods. We investigate the properties and advantages of SUAVE in the context of a search mission with 11 UAVs finding a strong advantage for finding targets While performance is expected to improve with increasing numbers of UAVs we did not find differences in performance between models generated by 11 UAVs and those employing 22 UAVs.