SBIR-STTR Award

The goal of this project is to develop a collaborative engagement tool for mission planning and task allocation for the command and control of autonomous unmanned vehicles. The primary project objective is to design a real-time, automated software tool that collaborates and allocates tasks for multiple unmanned vehicles to engage a target on real military systems. At the successful completion of Phase I of this project, we will have identified primary constraints to the development of a real-time collaborative engagement system and developed a software tool design and architecture framework that performs the collaborative engagement among heterogeneous unmanned vehicles and the human supervisor.

Benefits:
Through the integration of state-of-the-art unmanned system collaboration technologies and human-robotics interaction methodologies, our collaboration engagement system tool will provide the warfighter with an adaptive, dynamic execution of autonomous target engagement using collaborating unmanned vehicles. This will allow the human supervisor to fully monitor unmanned system mission execution and dynamically correct mission parameters real-time to ensure the unmanned system successfully achieves the mission goals.

Keywords:
collaborative engagement, unmanned systems, fires and effects, autonomous operations, UGV, UAV, robot, human-in-the-loop

The asymmetric warfare common today requires engagement of small groups and even solitary combatants. Currently, each unmanned system used for surveillance requires a single operator, and, collaboration between operators must be moderated in a complicated fashion. This configuration is not an effective usage of manpower and hinders the efficiency necessary for time-critical geolocation of elusive targets. However, state of the art methods of multi-robot teaming have the potential to allow a single operator to control multiple unmanned systems, interacting with them at a high level. Such an approach will enable the unmanned systems to operate autonomously for extended periods, working collaboratively to pinpoint targets of interest. Our approach ties together three important multi-robot teaming components into a Collaborative Engagement system that can operate in the current architecture used by ARDEC. First, we will use a Mission Planner, developed under current ARDEC funding for the Overseer program to set up and manage mission threads. Second, we will use a formulation called Decentralized Data Fusion that enables an efficient and robust means of integrating data from multiple sources. Third, we will use a state of the art coordination scheme that allows each unmanned vehicle to operate in a distributed manner as it plays its role as a part of the team.

Keywords:
Unmanned Systems, Collaborative Engagement, Elusive Target Tracking, Aerial Reconnaissance