Autonomous Mission Planning and Flight Control for Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Operations.

There is a recognized need for protecting important national assets such as civil airports,
nuclear power plants etc., and methods that will enable long endurance and rapidly
deployable/reconfigurable networks for persistent surveillance are a critical enabling
technology. While small airborne platforms traditionally suffer from short flight times
due to limited battery power, persistent ISR will require external power sources in order
to achieve long endurance times.
To facilitate these long endurance times, wireless power transfer is essential. Laser-based
wireless power transfer has been shown to be very effective in laboratory conditions, but
to scale this technology to operational scenarios of modern and next-generation ISR
systems, core technologies to enable effective, safe, resilient and optimal mission
planning strategies that are driven by an appropriate level of autonomy are essential. To
achieve operational capability, it is essential to develop novel
schemes/algorithms/architectures for autonomous mission planning and flight control in a
multi-fidelity simulation environment.