Aviator Mission Tasker of Distributed Unmanned Assets

With the advent of glass cockpits in the CH-47F, UH-60M and AH-64D Block III, the Army has recognized the opportunity to control Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) from the cockpit of its manned aircraft. The combined Manned Un-Manned (MUM) team promises to provide the Army aviator with improved situational awareness and mission effectiveness, thereby improving combat outcomes without degrading the mission safety. Typical UAS controls require intensive user inputs to specify the desired mission behaviors. In the cockpit, this presents a high cognitive demand that increases flight risks. MUM team operations need an innovative and effective way to dynamically task distributed unmanned assets that is adaptable by the user community, both at design time and in the cockpit at execution time. Applied Systems Intelligence, Inc. and Georgia Tech Research Institute have teamed to develop adaptive tasking for distributed unmanned assets to improve tactical management of MUM teams. Our approach is called Collaborative Adaptive Tasking System, or CATS. CATS uses a goal-activity-action representation together with a global situation model to provide robust task definition and execution that will create large gains in operational capability for the joint manned UAS team.