Multiple eyes in the skies

The management of environmental and industrial disasters, search and rescue operations, surveillance of natural scenarios, environmental monitoring, and many other field robotics applications require high mobility and the need to reach locations that are difficult to access with ground vehicles. In many cases, the use of aerial vehicles is the best way to approach the objective to get information or to deploy instrumentation. Unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) have significantly increased their flight performance and autonomous onboard processing capabilities in the last ten years. But a single aerial vehicle equipped with a large array of different sensors of various modalities is limited at any time to a single viewpoint. A team of aerial vehicles, however, can simultaneously collect information from multiple locations and exploit the information derived from multiple disparate points. Furthermore, having a team with multiple heterogeneous aerial vehicles offers additional advantages due to the possibility of beneficial complementarities of the vehicles.