The general objective of the project is the design, development and experimentation of a platform providing the middleware and the functionalities required for the cooperation among aerial flying objects, i.e. autonomous helicopters, and a ground sensor-actuator wireless network, including mobile nodes carried by people and vehicles. The platform will enable the operation in sites with difficult access and without communication infrastructure. Then, the project considers the self-deploying of the network by means of autonomous helicopters with the ability to transport and deploy loads (communication equipment and nodes of the ground network).

To reach the above mentioned main goal, the project has the following technical objectives:

1. Develop a scalable and self-organizing ground sensor network;
2. Develop the architecture and middleware required for the cooperation of the heterogeneous objects including aerial vehicles, static sensor-actuator nodes, and mobile nodes carried by ground vehicles and people;
3. Develop network-centric functionalities for the system operation, including the development of perception techniques and the reliable co-operation based on the explicit consideration of the main sources of failures in the network operation;
4. Develop new cooperation techniques for tasks requiring strong interactions among vehicles and between vehicles and the environment, such as lifting and transporting the same load with several UAVs.

In order to verify the success in reaching the objectives, the project considers the validation in two different applications: Civil Security/Disaster Management and Filming dynamically evolving scenes with mobile objects. Three general experiments in a common scenario will be conducted in order to integrate the system and test the functionalities required for the above validations.

The expected results and techniques will be transferable to many potential applications involving wireless networking of heterogeneous objects.