Research Summaries

Back Operator-Level Programming and Control of Unmanned Air Vehicle Swarms: Development and Field Experimentation

Fiscal Year 2018
Division Graduate School of Engineering & Applied Science
Department Systems Engineering
Investigator(s) Giles, Kathleen B.
Yakimenko, Oleg A.
Giachetti, Ronald E.
Sponsor Office of Naval Research (Navy)
Summary The objective of the project is twofold:
1. A mission-based framework to program swarm missions at higher abstraction levels amenable to programming by Marine operators.
2. A control architecture to enable a single operator to issue commands to the swarm and let the swarm manage the lower-level details of implementing the commands.
The first objective addresses the challenge that programming UAVs requires highly specialized expertise. We want to enable mission planning at an abstraction level suitable for a Marine officer to program the mission. The second objective is to address the challenges of controlling a swarm in the field. We desire to control a swarm at the macro level to relieve the operator of managing each individual UAV. The vision is for a single Marine to control the entire swarm by issuing macro commands to the swarm, and each individual UAV communicates and coordinates with the other UAVs to execute the commands to the swarm.
We intend to test and evaluate our swarm mission framework and swarm control algorithms in realistic conditions at a MOUT facility.
Keywords Autonomous systems System Architecture systems of systems
Publications Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal
Data Publications, theses (not shown) and data repositories will be added to the portal record when information is available in FAIRS and brought back to the portal