Intelligent robotic autonomous systems (unmanned aerial/ground/surface/underwater vehicles) are attractive for militaryapplication to relieve humans from tedious or dangerous tasks. These systems require awareness of the environment andtheir own performance to reach a mission goal. This awareness enables them to adapt their operations to handle unexpectedchanges in the environment and uncertainty in assessments. Components of the autonomous system cannot rely on perfectawareness or actuator execution, and mistakes of one component can affect the entire system. To obtain a robust system,a system-wide approach is needed and a realistic model of all aspects of the system and its environment. In this paper, wepresent our study on the design and development of a fully functional autonomous system, consisting of sensors,observation processing and behavior analysis, information database, knowledge base, communication, planning processes,and actuators. The system behaves as a teammate of a human operator and can perform tasks independently with minimalinteraction. The system keeps the human informed about relevant developments that may require human assistance, andthe human can always redirect the system with high-level instructions. The communication behavior is implemented as aSocial AI Layer (SAIL). The autonomous system was tested in a simulation environment to support rapid prototyping andevaluation. The simulation is based on the Robotic Operating System (ROS) with fully modelled sensors and actuators andthe 3D graphics-enabled physics simulation software Gazebo. In this simulation, various flying and driving autonomoussystems can execute their tasks in a realistic 3D environment with scripted or user-controlled threats. The results show theperformance of autonomous operation as well as interaction with humans.
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