Aurora Flight Sciences Initiates Collaborative Program with Olin College of Engineering

18th September 2008 - 01:00 GMT | by The Shephard News Team

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Aurora Flight Sciences announced today the beginning of a collaboration with the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering in Needham, Massachusetts. The collaboration, under the umbrella of Olin’s Senior Consulting Program for Engineering (SCOPE) program, will bring together a team of senior Olin students with Aurora engineers to solve real-life engineering problems.

The Olin SCOPE team sponsored by Aurora this year will be supporting a research effort in the area of autonomous multi-vehicle cooperative control for unmanned air and sea vehicles conducting littoral operations. Such operations can include missions as varied as mine search, force protection, and search, detection, and identification of threats in riverine, harbor, or coastal environments.

The main objective of this project will be to successfully deploy multi-vehicle coordination algorithms onto teams of actual Unmanned Surface Vessels (USVs) and Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs), using Aurora’s On-board Planning Module (OPM). The OPM is a combined hardware/software element that enables coordination among teams of heterogeneous vehicles. The Olin SCOPE team will be providing a USV of their design to participate in multi-vehicle in-water demonstrations with Aurora’s USV. To this end, the SCOPE team will engineer the integration of the Aurora OPM into their USV system, install the OPM, and conduct end-to-end system testing. In addition, the Olin SCOPE team will research, develop, and integrate a target sensor that can be used by the USV during demonstrations to identify and track test targets.