The C3UV testbed for collaborative control and information acquisition using UAVs

In this paper we introduce the Center for Collaborative Control of Unmanned Vehicles (C3UV) testbed for collaborative information acquisition. The C3UV testbed has been used for demonstrating a wide range of information-oriented applications executed by collaborative teams of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). This paper presents the C3UV testbed from an architectural stand-point. The testbed includes a estimation and control architecture and a software architecture. The estimation and control architecture is a set of components that can be composed to perform specific missions. The software architecture supports the execution of estimation and control components and implements the Collaborative Sensing Language - a language for highlevel specification of mission-level controllers for mobile sensor networks with ad-hoc resource pool and dynamic network topology. We show the use of different layers of the architecture using examples from our field experiments and demonstrations. Our heterogeneous teams of UAVs perform several types of missions such as environmental monitoring, pedestrian search and tracking, and river mapping.