System-of-Systems for Remote Situational Awareness: Integrating Unattended Ground Sensor Systems with Autonomous Unmanned Aerial System and Android Team Awareness Kit

This paper proposes a system-of-systems (SoS) consisting of a set of unattended ground sensor (UGS) system and a quadrotor unmanned aerial system (UAS) to detect and localize an object in a large area. In this work, acoustic and seismic sensors were employed to detect the physical presence of the object in the area being monitored. The directional information of the moving object was inferred from the simple geometry of the locations of these acoustic and seismic sensors. Communication from UGS system to quadrotor UAS was established via android tactical assault kit (ATAK). In addition, based on the message transmissions from the UGS system, ATAK was used to dispatch the quadrotor UAS to search, identify, and visualize the target and further obtain a more accurate target location. This work describes the integration of heterogeneous technology devices between UGS system and quadrotor UAS to provide humans with real-time visual information for remote situational awareness. Through the experiment, we validate the proposed system configurations and network architecture are viable and robust for use in the real-world application.