Swarming UAS II.

摘要

The Aviation and Missile Research, Development, and Engineering Center (AM-RDEC) Advanced Science and Technology Unmanned Systems Office plans the way ahead for UAS. Their intent is to pursue technologies that increase the functionality of UAS while simultaneously reducing the workload on the user. Recent Operations Research Center of Excellence (ORCEN) research by MAJ Ed Teague, DSE-R-0808, showed that simple rule sets can organize multiple UAS to complete tasks with little or no input from controllers/users (Teague and Kewley, 2008). As a matter of design, DSE-R-0808 employed biomimicry to model a swarm of UAS as a colony of ants, where each UAS dynamically updates a global memory map, allowing pheromone-like communication (see DTIC: ADA489366 for additional details). In particular, the major findings of DSE-R-0808 were: (1) Semi-Autonomous Self-Organizing (SASC) UAS are possible using preprogrammed tasks and pheromone communication methods; (2) Depending on the rate of pheromone decay and the influence of distant pheromone levels, multiple UAS seem to sufficiently cover a large area without any input beyond a global rule set; (3) SASC behaviors were tested via federated simulation, and its performance is comparable to preprogrammed routing without the overhead.