AUSPEX: An Integrated Open-Source Decision-Making Framework for UAVs in Rescue Missions

Björn Döschl^*Kai SommerJane Jean Kiam^*

• Institut für Flugsysteme, Universität der Bundeswehr München, Neubiberg, Germany

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have become paramount for Search and Rescue (SAR) missions due to their ability to access hazardous and challenging environments and to rapidly provide cost-effective aerial situational awareness. Nevertheless, current UAV systems are designed for specific tasks, often focusing on benchmarking use cases. Therefore, they offer limited adaptability for the diverse decision-making demands of SAR missions. Furthermore, commercially available integrated UAV systems are non-open-source, preventing further extension with state-of-the-art decision-making algorithms. This paper introduces AUSPEX, a holistic, modular, and open-source framework tailored specifically for enhancing the decision-making capabilities of UAV systems. AUSPEX integrates diverse capabilities for knowledge representation, perception, planning and execution with state-of-the-art decision-making algorithms. Additionally, AUSPEX considers the heterogeneity of available UAV platforms and offers the possibility of including off-the-shelf as well as generic UAVs with an open architecture into the AUSPEX ecosystem. The framework relies only on open-source components to ensure transparency, aswell as system scalability and extensibility. We demonstrate AUSPEX's integration with the Unreal Engine based simulation framework REAP for software-in-the-loop validation and a platformindependent graphical user interface (AUGUR). We demonstrate how AUSPEX can be used for generic scenarios in SAR missions while highlighting its potential for future extensibility.