A recent paper by members of the DCIST alliance shows how multiple UAVs can collaborate to build a map of unstructured environments and find people, for example hikers lost in the woods. The capability is supported by a semantic model of forests which leads to more robust map merging. This kind of semantic understanding and world modeling will feed into the world models that will be required to enable DCIST missions. The next steps in this work are to bring the technology into the DCIST program and generalize it to heterogeneous teams of vehicles operating in a broader class of environments.  Read more here.

Full Paper: http://groups.csail.mit.edu/rrg/papers/tian_liu_ok_iser2018.pdf
Points of Contact: Nick Roy and Jon How