Design and experimental validation of UAV-assisted radiological and nuclear sensing

For the detection of radiological and nuclear material a wide - area deployment of unmanned ground and aerial vehicles acting as an autonomous sensor swarm has been developed and validated by the ANCHORS project. In this paper the software architecture and platform for the control of the heterogeneous robot system as well as the communication system are presented. For a highly-reliable communication the ANCHORS system integrates a flexible ad-hoc wireless communication infrastructure using a combination of a stand-alone LTE system and IEEE 802.11s wireless mesh networking technology. The system was validated in 2015 during a large-scale fire brigade exercise in strong cooperation with potential end-users. Ongoing research addresses the integration of the results gained with systems such as the ANCHORS system in a cloud-based data storage accessible for rescue organizations. The paper introduces therefore the combination of the autonomous distributed sensor swarm with a cloud emergency information system concept currently developed within the EU-Project SecInCoRe (Secure Dynamic Cloud for Information, Communication and Resource Interoperability based on Pan-European Disaster Inventory).