Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) applications have witnessed significant advancements across diverse domains, including surveillance, agriculture, disaster management, and environmental monitoring. UAV sensors can gather critical data, enabling real-time decision-making and enhancing operational capabilities.

Objectives:

• Demonstrate aerial autonomous search and rescue systems (manned/unmanned), using image-based Automatic Target Search System.
• Means of pattern recognition, perception, reasoning, decision-making, and machine learning combining available resources for situation assessment and action on Search and Rescue missions.

Two use cases:

Aerial navigation in GNSS contested environments is a challenge for both manned and unmanned aircraft. This research project aims to study and develop technologies and algorithms to address the problem of aerial navigation without relying on GNSS, focusing on a specific image-based navigation with multi-sensor fusion in order to get a precise localization of the aircraft. The proposal application to be used in this research project is related to an aerial transport of goods in a remote area (challenging environment and low risk area), using real time image processing and another embedded sensor processing to improve the aircraft localization, without using GNSS data. This application has a dual use (both military and civil).