TAMOS EN — Squadrone-System

TAMOS, for TActical Multi-Objective Swarming UAVs, is a 2-year research project funded by DGA related to the supervision and implementation of UAV swarms with civil and military applications.

Context and objectives

The use of miniature aerial UAVs is a growing phenomenon. Indeed, after the large UAVs reserved for the military field and those dedicated to scientific studies, light UAVs are now widespread for civilian applications thanks to their agility and attractive costs. Demonstrators are notably emerging in the fields of defense and security.
Moreover, coordination in swarms would make it possible to multiply the gains brought by light UAVs. Among these, reducing the size of UAVs, distributing the payload, speeding up the completion of a mission and offering the possibility of deploying a fleet of UAVs on several missions in parallel are all benefits that pave the way for new uses.

We can thus imagine UAV swarms working together to quickly find victims during natural disasters, to organize themselves for site surveillance, inspection of sensitive areas, or to delimit a fire and provide information on its evolution in real time... The applications are very numerous and concern fields as diverse as warehouse logistics, agriculture, rail transport, defense and security.

our objectives

The decision-making autonomy of a complete system made up of a fleet of different UAV systems is the key element, allowing to respond to a tactical operational reconfiguration without the need for a permanently dedicated operator.

In this context, our objectives are threefold:

Implementing a swarm of UAVs in order to enable the accomplishment of several missions or missions with a longer range in time and space.
Adapting the configuration of the available fleet to heterogeneous and potentially multiple missions.
Enabling the UAV swarm system operator of easily deploying a mission in optimal active safety conditions through a simple Human-System Interface and swarm autonomy functions adapted to the mission.

The organization

In this project, Squadrone System and its partners will build a system with 4 main sub-systems :

A supervisor will be responsible for assigning staff to the missions and managing the smooth running of the missions. Being the only interface with the user, the supervisor will have to allow a simple and quick implementation and provide a global view of the progress of missions and the state of the fleets.
Each mission will be independently controlled via a mission management body in order to define objectives for the fleets, particularly in terms of trajectory planning and UAV coordination.

These first two elements will be integrated on a base station which will be materialized, depending on the application, by a computer, a tablet or a control case (in a military context for example)..

Various formation guidance strategies can be used to control each UAV unit within the swarm with military or civilian tactical purposes, depending on the constraints at play.
Each agent will integrate an autopilot card capable of estimating the state of the drone with the help of sensors and of regulating the command instructions transmitted by the guidance system. The platforms targeted within the framework of the project will be of the multicopter type with a mass of between 1 and 5kg.
Eventually, any type of UAV (multi-copter, fixed-wing or hybrid v-tol) will be supported by the work carried out and it will even be possible to use the results of the work undertaken in this project for terrestrial or maritime robots, or even to coordinate robots of different types (for example terrestrial and aerial).