Secure cooperative ad hoc applications within UAV fleets position paper

A proper situation management system is one of the keys to success on the battlefield. It strongly relies on data collection, fusion and interpretation. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are becoming a major collection platform, but there is almost no collaborative intelligence in these systems. We claim that a swarm of small UAVs connected together that could make cooperative decisions in an autonomous way (without requiring any intervention from the ground) would be a major contributor to the information superiority. In this paper we present our vision of this approach and the research project that we are running to achieve an operational system. It deals with levels 1, 2 and 4 of the DoD JDL definition of information fusion. This is a position paper describing a work in progress.