Autonomy Management Platform

Autonomous vehicles are becoming more and more integral to our nation's defense. A DoD object is to free humans from direct control and move towards supervisory control of multiple, autonomous assets. Achieving this objective will require significant advances in decision support and supervisory control concepts. Current operator interfaces require continuous attention from the operator to a single unmanned vehicle. In fact, many require the attention of several operators. In addition, designing and building the decision support components often requires significant expertise in computer science, artificial intelligence, and software engineering. This makes the cost of developing, maintaining, and modifying these systems exorbitant. Our approach is to design reusable, ontology-driven decision support tools that can be configured into an Autonomy Management Platform (AMP) that can assist an operator in controlling and directing several unmanned vehicles at the same time. We also propose an ontology editor that lets non-computer scientists create and update the assets, capabilities, tasks, and environment of the various unmanned vehicles. These ontologies are used by the decision support tools, which allows for flexibility and extensibility of AMP. The benefits will be reduced cost of operations and increased productivity of the operators while saving time and money in the design, deployment, and maintenance of decision support systems for multi-asset coordination.