Software Development for Unmanned Vehicle Systems

The Helmut Schmidt University (HSU) is seeking to further develop an existing fleet of unmanned vehicles as part of the RIVA project. This project aims to establish technological and legal foundations for the economic utilization of multimodal vehicle systems. HSU will explore and test approaches for coordinating these vehicle systems, which must consist of safe, autonomous, and unmanned vehicles across various modalities (land, water, air) capable of independently executing missions. HSU plans to design and implement corresponding IT solutions and will also investigate related public law issues. Autonomous vehicle systems hold significant economic and societal potential, as they can effectively and efficiently realize many applications compared to individual vehicles. The range of such systems includes unimodal vehicle fleets (e.g., drone swarms for forest fire fighting) to trimodal vehicle systems (e.g., rescue operations for shipwrecked individuals using vehicle fleets: drones for reconnaissance, floating rescue robots for recovery, and land robots for transport). Current algorithms have limited capabilities to respond to unforeseen disruptions. The RIVA project will examine how a dynamic control structure, combining central and decentralized approaches, can execute missions more efficiently and enhance the robustness and adaptability of a fleet in the event of system component failures or individual agent losses.