Human-Guided Management of Collaborating Unmanned Vehicles in Degraded Communication Environments.

摘要

Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs) currently fulfill important roles in modern military operations. Present commitments to research and development e orts for future UASs indicate that their ubiquity and the scope of their applications will only continue to increase. For sophisticated UASs characterized by coordination of multiple vehicles, it is a formidable challenge to maintain an understanding of the complexities arising from the interaction of human supervisory control, automated planning, and network communication. This research investigates the robustness of UAS performance under degraded communication conditions through simulation with a particular futuristic UAS, the On-board Planning System for UxVs in Support of Expeditionary Reconnaissance and Surveillance (OPS-USERS) system. The availability of reliable communications is vital to the success of current UASs. This dependence is not likely to be diminished in future systems where increased inter-vehicle collaboration may actually increase reliance on communications. Characterizing the e effects of communications availability on the performance of a simulated UAS provides crucial insight into the response of UASs to communication failure modes which may be encountered in real-world implementations. Additionally, defining a minimum tolerable level of communication availability which will allow a UAS to operate with acceptable performance represents the groundwork for designing engineering specifications for communications systems as well as for defining conditions under which such a system could be expected to operate effectively. Experiments are designed and executed to investigate the impact of degraded communication conditions on the performance of UASs by sampling the performance of a simulated UAS under a variety of degraded communication conditions.