Led by Nabil Aouf, Professor of Autonomous Systems at City St George’s, a team of students from the School of Science & Technology have been pushing the boundaries of artificial intelligence (AI) and navigation in autonomous drone development through the ‘Sense & Avoid – a cooPeratIvE droNe’ (SAPIENCE) programme.
SAPIENCE is a €1.2million programme sponsored by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in collaboration with the University of Alabama, Huntsville (USA); Delft University of Technology (Netherlands) and the University of Klagenfurt (Austria).
Funded through NATO’s Science for Peace and Security (SPS) Programme, SAPIENCE is fostering innovation in search and rescue operations, with the goal of enabling multiple drones to effectively navigate and map global positioning system (GPS) denied environments; detect and deliver aid to people in disaster areas; and perform complex cooperative tasks.
On the programme, student teams from each of the institutions are competing head-to-head across the range of drone search and rescue tasks held across them.
Hosted at City St George’s in August 2024, the first competition simulated an indoor environment which took the form of a ‘rescue room’ in a disaster-stricken building. A second, upcoming competition will take place in an outdoor disaster environment, and a third will comprise of a mixture of an indoor and outdoor environment to test the robustness of teams’ solutions in varied settings.
Speaking at the programme outset in late 2023, Professor Aouf, who is also the academic lead across SAPIENCE, shared:
“The project may directly lead to advances in the practical use of drone systems for emergency response. The participating teams will have to come up with innovative ideas to tackle the posed challenges, which may advance the state of the art. The competition can even have a broader impact on the field of drone technology. By promoting innovation, collaboration, and knowledge sharing, the competition can help to bring about important advances in the field and contribute to the overall growth and development of drone technology.”
He further reminded the live audience during the inaugural competition:
“I want to emphasise that in the drone competitions that we are conducting through this programme, there is no tele-operation at all. It’s all fully autonomous, which is actually very risky, and challenging.”
The SAPIENCE programme is only just hotting up, and new learning is continually on the horizon. A sentiment shared by Claudio Palestini, Head of the NATO Science for Peace and Security Programme:
“This activity perfectly captures the spirit of the SPS Programme, bringing together teams of young researchers from NATO and Partner countries to advance technological solutions to tackle modern challenges, such as autonomy, artificial intelligence, human-machine teaming, and more.”