General idea of the research:
This multi-layered task involves autonomous aerial and surface vehicles working together in a GNSS-denied environment off the coast, to detect unfriendly vessels and offload goods from them in the shortest possible time.

The Task:
Two principal tasks: inspection and intervention.

Inspection Task:
The Unmanned Areial Vehicles (UAVs) swarm is used to monitor a large surface area of water to identify vessels which are in motion. Out of the total number of vessels present, there will be a subset of ‘target’ vessels. Once a vessel is found, the UAV swarm deploys to identify whether it is a target or not through a scan of the vessel with the following outcomes to be transmitted to the Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USV):
• A 3D model of the vessel to match with a reference model.
• In the case of a possible target vessel, a Boolean “suspected”/ “not suspected” signal is transmitted to the rest of the swarm through intra- swarm communication for collective decision making.
• Once a target vessel is confirmed by the operator, the USV+UAV swarm system proceeds to the intervention task.

Intervention Task:
• For the vessels that are potentially classified as target:
• Video streaming is activated between the UAVs and the USV.
• The operator watches the video and confirms the nature of the vessel.
• If the operator does not confirm the suspected target because the UAVs made a wrong collective decision, the team will be penalised by increasing the mission completion time with a pre-defined number of minutes and the swarm will resume searching.