Grant: Strategic Projects Supplemental Competition

The proposed communicating networked team of unmanned systems (UMS) consisits of a large number of deployed satellites, unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs), unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), and unattended ground sensors (UGSs). The goals and objectives of the research investigated in this application are to provide enhanced capabilities and support system to ground operators in determining the most efficient and optimal allocation, configuration, architectures, and control for the unmanned assets to autonomously and intelligently respond to environmental uncertainties for achieving the evolving mission requirements. Design and development of self-organizing and intelligent unmanned networks composed of individual autonomous/semi-autonomous agents that demonstrate complex collective behaviors offer several novel advantages and opportunities that are not currently demonstrated and possible. The agents in UMS should adapt their strategies hi response to actions by others or due to anamolies, faults, and failures in sensors, actuators, and components of the UMS assets and should quickly cope with environmental, terrain and mission objective changes. The proposed overall novel modeling, analysis, and design techniques developed here are envisaged to utilize rigorous mathematical model-based decision theoretic algorithms, nonlinear robust and adaptive techniques, collaborative and cooperative distributed control, and computationally intelligent algorithms. By utilizing the overall software architectures developed in this project, the operators involved in planning, scheduling, task allocation and management of UMS assets are empowered with decision making tools and support systems to generate rules and procedures for an effective execution and response to adversarial threats as well as faults and failures. The proposed innovative solutions should lead to enhanced mission performance through minimizing and optimizing communication exchanges with support and guidance from ground managers and are made feasible by ensuring that the UMS agents are able to "think" for them-selves, and act in novel ways to ensure they carry out the goals of the mission.