Stakeholder Analysis for the Virtual Autonomous Navigation Environment: Determining Value within the Joint Ground Robotics Enterprise and Usage Across the Robotics Technology Community

摘要

As unmanned ground vehicle platforms are developed and assessed throughout the acquisition lifecycle, environments for development and assessment are often rebuilt, resulting in increased costs and limited ability to compare or pool results. To address this issue, a Virtual Autonomous Navigation Environment (VANE) is being developed to facilitate design, testing, and analysis of unmanned ground vehicle (UGV) performance at subsystem, system, and system-of-systems levels. This work is being sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) Joint Ground Robotics Enterprise (JGRE) through the Robotic Systems Joint Project Office (RS JPO) and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center Research, Development, Test, and Evaluation program. To develop a VANE that will readily support many communities, determining stakeholder needs and required system functions is critical. Interoperability with existing and future simulations, software and hardware applications was a focus of the analysis. The stakeholder analysis, functional analysis, and value modeling will be presented in this paper. The result is a means of designing a virtual environment to support unmanned ground vehicle development and analysis across a range of users, systems, and stakeholders.