The IMM project seeks to improve UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) performance, especially for high-altitude, long-endurance missions, such as long-endurance flights for spotting wildfires or for scientific observation.

Apex's autonomy services help maximize the information benefits of observation missions by creating flight plans generated by reasoning about trade-offs between the benefits of information gathered and the cost of gathering that information. A second role for Apex autonomy services is to decrease operational costs of long-endurance missions. This includes decreasing not only personnel costs through automation, but also costs accrued through unanticipated losses, such as damage to a sensitive optical sensor accidentally pointed at the sun or aircraft loss resulting from a critical system failure. Autonomy software can minimize failure costs both by avoiding bad decisions that cause failure and by responding quickly and correctly to failures in other systems.

For more information about how Apex is used in managing missions, see the 2005 AIAA paper, An Architecture for Intelligent Management of Aerial Observation Missions. For general information about the IMM project, see the IMM website.