This paper presents a cooperative perception system for multiple heterogeneous unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It considers different kind of sensors: infrared and visual cameras and fire detectors. The system is based on a set of multipurpose low‐level image‐processing functions including segmentation, stabilization of sequences of images, and geo‐referencing, and it also involves data fusion algorithms for cooperative perception. It has been tested in field experiments that pursued autonomous multi‐UAV cooperative detection, monitoring, and measurement of forest fires. This paper presents the overall architecture of the perception system, describes some of the implemented cooperative perception techniques, and shows experimental results on automatic forest fire detection and localization with cooperating UAVs. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

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This paper presents the architecture developed in the framework of the AWARE project for the autonomous distributed cooperation between unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), wireless sensor/actuator networks and ground camera networks. One of the main goals was the demonstration of useful actuation capabilities involving multiple ground and aerial robots in the context of civil applications. A novel characteristic is the demonstration in field experiments of the transportation and deployment of the same load with single/multiple autonomous aerial vehicles.The architecture is endowed with different modules that solve the usual problems that arise during the execution of multi-purpose missions, such as task allocation, conflict resolution, task decomposition and sensor data fusion. The approach had to satisfy two main requirements: robustness for the operation in disaster management scenarios and easy integration of different autonomous vehicles. The former specification led to a distributed design and the latter was tackled by imposing several requirements on the execution capabilities of the vehicles to be integrated in the platform.