Team of Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) and Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV) for Emergency Response in Mining Applications

Incident managers need a way of safely evaluating underground mines before committing human resources to respond to an emergency. Unmanned systems are a good candidate to do the dirty, dangerous, and dull work of mapping extensive networks of tunnels and capturing imagery of ceilings and walls. A team of unmanned ground and unmanned air vehicles is well suited to the task, as the ground vehicle can act as an aircraft carrier to refuel and resupply the air vehicle and thus allow extended operation. The expected result is a cooperative UAS/UGV system capable of autonomously charting an extended path through confined and severely obstructed spaces to the area of interest, inspecting the area of interest in detail for an extended period of time, and returning image and sensor data. A crawl/walk/run approach will be used, with each subsystem starting as a proof-of-concept demonstrator with the most basic of functionality. In short, unmanned air/ground vehicle teams will enable better emergency response in underground mines.