Dynamic Transfer of Control Between Manned and Unmanned Simulation Actors

摘要

This thesis continues the ongoing research at the Air Force Institute ofTechnology's Virtual Environments Laboratory in the area of distributed simulation. As the relevance and interest of interactive simulation as a training medium continues to grow, there is a pressing need to provide more realistic and numerous intelligent autonomous agents for simulations. As those autonomous agents mature and become more realistic, the need exists to be able to handle individual agents by taking control of them and operating them as manned agents at certain points within the simulation. The author started with a protocol proposed in a working draft of the Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) Protocol Standard 2.1.1 (Draft). He demonstrates how this protocol can be improved by swapping control between two entities involved in a distributed simulation. The new protocol provides simultaneous transfer while being compatible with the one proposed in the draft standard. The protocol is implemented on two applications developed in the Virtual Environments Laboratory, the Virtual Cockpit (VC) and the Automated Wingman (AW). The anticipated flow of execution begins with the AW requesting assistance. The operator of the VC then can reply by assuming control of the AW. Once the required human operation has been performed, the operator may switch back to the lead aircraft, completing the full cycle of execution.