STOCOTA: Software Toolkit for the Operational Control of Tactical Autonomy

Army aviation remains critical to the success of military operations, but as technology advances and enemies adapt, its traditional operational concepts must evolve for continued success. Aviators possess a level of situational awareness and tactical insight that makes them good candidates to coordinate unmanned systems during tactical reconnaissance, transport, and attack missions. The integration of manned and unmanned operations is limited by: (1) the cognitive challenges of the operator; (2) the capability to encode tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs) for autonomous vehicles; and (3) the adaptability of these to enemies"changing tactics. To address these issues, we propose a Software Toolkit for the Operational Control of Tactical Autonomy. STOCOTA is a tactical management system for planners to specify, adapt, and validate TTPs that also enables army aviators to effectively employ and coordinate UAVs using encoded and configurable autonomous control instructions (ACIs). Our system consists of: (1) the capability to encode TTPs into autonomous ACIs; (2) a component for aviators to pass instructions to UAVs that support their tactical missions; (3) an ecological user interface with adaptive-complexity; and (4) a simulation component to validate the ACIs and determine if they perform as expected.