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Talk-05: Title Deploying a Fixed-Wing UAV Swarm for Wildfire Detection Using MOOS-IvP: Integration, Communication, and Field Results
Steve Carter Feujo Nomeny
Kongsberg Discovery, MIT, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
This talk presents the end-to-end design, integration, and field deployment of an autonomous multi-UAV system for cooperative wildfire detection, built on the MOOS- IvP autonomy framework.
Each UAV is a Skywalker X8 fixed-wing platform running a Cube Orange autopilot (ArduPilot/ArduPlane) with an Odroid XU4 single-board computer as the payload computer. The IvP Helm runs entirely on the payload computer following the backseat driver paradigm, issuing high-level course, speed, and altitude commands to ArduPilot over a UART serial connection via a dedicated MOOS bridge application. A custom pArduBridge application handles the MAVLink interface, translating between the MOOS publish-subscribe world and ArduPilot's protocol and enforcing a Return-to-Launch failsafe if the MOOS GCS connection is lost.
Inter-vehicle and vehicle-to-ground communication runs over a 5.8 GHz Ubiquiti mesh radio network, with a 433 MHz SiK telemetry link providing MAVLink redundancy. Each vehicle runs its own MOOS community; the MOOS Swarm Toolbox's pShare and pNodeReporter applications handle real-time state sharing across the fleet over the LAN, giving each vehicle situational awareness of its teammates. Mission monitoring and high-level commanding is handled from a laptop running pMarineViewer.
The system was validated through a combination of ArduPilot SITL/Gazebo simulation and live field trials at the NTNU UAV Lab. Field tests involved two Skywalker X8s executing a cooperative search mission with 10 fire targets across four di_erent starting configurations. Lessons learned around practical realities of launching and coordinating fixed-wing platforms will be discussed as well as sharing of videos and images.
Categories:
- UAVs
- ArduPilot