Modeling of Complex Environment for Unmanned Ground Vehicles Performance Evaluations

The objective of this proposal is continue research, designing and developing a model of a complex environment including architecture configuration, building material, foliage and vegetation data that can be used to further evaluate existing radio, waveform and antenna models for tele-operation of UGVs in different environments, including rural and urban terrains. This work will advance the current simulation environment for modeling wireless communication networks used for supervised autonomy of Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs). Wireless communication networks are used to connect current fielded UGVs with Operator Control Units (OCUs), which are used to manage the operation of the vehicles and their payloads. Tele-operation technology is used to maneuver the UGV, and is also used by the vehicles payloads to perform their mission function. Radio functions, video format, resolution and compression routines are utilized to provide the operator streaming video for tele-operation. The challenge of dynamically and efficiently integrating the data related to building configuration, building materials, foliage and vegetation data into simulation framework has been identified. This data is needed for the radio and waveform models to accurately calculate the impacts on latency, packet/data loss and signal strength of streaming video algorithms for performance evaluation.