Small teams in the field can benefit from the capabilities provided by small Uncrewed Aerial Systems (sUAS) for missions such as reconnaissance, hostile attribution, remote emplacement, and search and rescue. The mobility, communications, and flexible payload capacity of sUAS can offer teams new levels of situational awareness and enable more highly coordinated missions than previously possible. However, piloting such aircraft for specific missions draws personnel away from other mission-critical tasks, increasing the load on remaining personnel while also increasing complexity of operations. For wider adoption and use of sUAS for security and humanitarian missions, safe and robust autonomy must be employed to reduce this burden on small teams. In this paper, we present the development of the Collaborative-UAS for Hostile Attribution, Surveillance, Emplacement, and Reconnaissance (CHASER) testbed, for rapidly prototyping capabilities that will reduce strain on small teams through sensor-guided autonomous control. We attempt to address autonomy needs unfilled by commercial sUAS platforms by creating and testing a series of composable modules that can be configured to support multiple missions. Methods implemented and presented here include radar track correlation, on-board computer vision target detection, target position estimation, closed-loop relative position control, and efficient search of a 3D volume for target acquisition. We configure and test a series of these modules in an example mission, executing a fully autonomous chase of an intruding sUAS in live flight, and demonstrating the success of the modularized autonomy approach. We present performance results from simulation or live flight tests for each module. Lastly, we describe the software architecture that we have developed for flexible controls and comment on how the capabilities presented may enable additional missions.

翻译：小型现场团队可受益于小型无人航空系统（sUAS）在侦察、敌对目标识别、远程部署及搜索救援等任务中提供的功能。sUAS的机动性、通信能力及灵活的有效载荷容量，能为团队带来新的态势感知水平，并实现比以往更高度的协同任务。然而，针对特定任务操控此类飞行器会分散人员对其他关键任务的注意力，增加剩余人员负担的同时提升操作复杂度。为在安全与人道主义任务中更广泛地采用sUAS，必须采用安全且稳健的自主技术，以减轻小型团队的压力。本文介绍了用于敌对目标识别、监视、部署与侦察的协作式无人机系统（CHASER）测试平台的开发过程，该平台通过传感器引导的自主控制快速原型化功能，旨在减轻小型团队的负担。我们致力于填补商用sUAS平台未能满足的自主需求，设计并测试了一系列可组合模块，这些模块可根据不同任务进行配置。本文实现并展示的方法包括雷达航迹关联、机载计算机视觉目标检测、目标位置估计、闭环相对位置控制以及三维空间高效搜索目标捕获。我们以示例任务配置并测试了系列模块，通过实飞执行对入侵sUAS的全自主追踪，验证了模块化自主方法的有效性。文中呈现了各模块在仿真或实飞测试中的性能结果。最后，我们介绍了为灵活控制而开发的软件架构，并探讨了所开发功能可能支持的更多任务场景。