Designing and Flight-Testing a Swarm of Small UAS to Assist Post-Nuclear Blast Forensics
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Nuclear blasts leave plumes of residue and sources of radiation behind that can be used to determine their origin. To assist in locating the best areas to collect ground samples a team from West Point developed an autonomous Unmanned Aircraft System (UAS) swarm system for expedited remote sensing. The system includes several distributed control algorithms to enable a team of quadrotor UAS to rapidly survey regions for radiation. Each vehicle is equipped with a sensor suite to measure radiation and estimate the source strength on the surface. While UAS survey the area, their data is fused into a single heatmap which becomes available in real-time to end-users employing the Android Tactical Assault Kit (ATAK). A rapid deployment system was developed to streamline how UAS are configured in preflight and enables them to launch directly from a box used for transport. The system was successfully demonstrated in a live flight test event over an active radiation field at Savannah River Site SC in April 2019.