Development of Autonomy Levels Through Functional Decomposition and Allocation

摘要

The future Army will utilize unmanned systems across the battlefield for many purposes. As the integrator for all platforms in the Army's Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, both manned and unmanned, The Boeing Company must fully specify performance of these unmanned FCS systems. The Army requires various levels of autonomy for these systems. In order to specify performance of unmanned systems, the Maneuver Requirements Lead needed to understand what combinations of functions performed by the machine constituted the various levels of autonomy. Unintentionally, the systems engineering process produced definitions for five autonomy levels that are generally applicable to all unmanned systems, independent of purpose or context. These definitions were presented to the Autonomy Levels for Unmanned Systems (ALFUS) working group, a federal program managed by the National Institute for Science and Technology, charged with the task of generating national guidelines for levels of autonomy. This paper was motivated by the positive reception by ALFUS of the definitions and the process by which they were developed.