Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) have served to enhance and augment the surveillance and reconnaissance abilities of the military of the United States of America. In developing the next generation of UAVs, the application of novel methodologies to UAV control will become more important as the number and mission criticality of deployed UAVs continues to increase. One of these novel approaches, long considered to possess some ideal characteristics, is the idea of reactive agents and the associated emergent behavior. This technique possesses the potential to provide minimal user intervention, a high level of robustness, and largely autonomous operation provided that suitable algorithms and techniques can be developed. The proposed work should provide the basic mathematical framework for reactive agent based Automatic Target Recognition in which these reactive agents could be simulated and, based on this simulation, optimization strategies for simple emergent behaviors developed along with mission based parameters estimated. The proposed approach models sensing behavior from an information theory perspective and then utilizes this in generating mission based system parameters followed by optimization of those parameters. If successful, this should allow for the implementation of reactive agent based techniques for UAV control embodying the benefits as appropriate.
Benefit: The proposed research should provide a sufficiently accurate simulation of reactive agent based automatic target recognition on unmanned aerial vehicles to allow evaluation of both the benefits and feasibility of potential future introduction of this technique into actual UAVs. Provided the research results in the eventual introduction of this technology into unmanned vehicles, this technique should provide a high level of flexibility and robustness for the selected missions. Augusta Systems would focus its commercialization activities on private and public sector clients in three key areas defense (including land and water applications), energy and environmental (including applications for geologic sequestration monitoring, watershed characterization, pipeline monitoring, etc.), and transportation (including applications for highway traffic monitoring and Coast Guard applications).
Keywords: mission based parameters, mission based parameters, SWARM, cooperative automatic target recognition, Reactive Agents, Emergent Behavior
