The Wallenberg laboratory for research on Information Technology and Autonomous Systems

General Project Goals

WITAS is a research laboratory within Linköping University, Sweden. Presently it only conducts one large project, developing information technology for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV's). Concretely, this means a small, unmanned helicopter carrying computers, video cameras, and other electronic equipment on board, using which it is capable of observing what goes on on the ground and of making decisions on that basis.

The project two kinds of goals with equal dignity:

• The system goal is to construct a particular UAV system, and to demonstrate it before the end of year 2003.

• The disciplinary research goal is to do high-class research on topics that are relevant for the design of such UAV's

For the system goal, and largely also for the disciplinary research, we concentrate on a particular operational environment, namely, for roads carrying automobile traffic. It is therefore required to "understand" what happens on those roads - conventional maneuvers of individual cars and other road vehicles, dangerous or otherwise exceptional maneuvers, structure of the traffic e.g. congestion. It is also to perform tasks that are assigned by the operator or triggered by the observations it makes itself, for example to follow a certain car that flees from the scene of an apparent crime, or to assist a certain car so that it can make it through difficult traffic and get to a particular destination as quickly as possible, or to deliver a particular parcel to a particular point.

The UAV is supposed to perform these functions autonomously, that is, without the direct intervention of a human operator. It is therefore not sufficient to design it for remote control of its maneuvers and other detailed operations: the operator is only supposed to communicate general commands, often using a combination of a phrase in natural language, and pointing to a map or video image. The most important capabilities for such a system are therefore (1) to form a model of ("understand") scenes and events that it observes on the ground, and (2) prediction, planning, and autonomous decisions using that model.

Maintenance information: Latest update 9.8.1999 by WITAS secretariat. Edit mode aml, position code D.witas.gen.goal.