Innovative Intelligent Agent and Cognitive Decision Aids Component Technology

The US Government has an immediate need to augment its ability to execute special operations for threat mitigation throughout an ever-burgeoning range of mission scenarios and operational environments. Unmanned systems offer the military an “out of harms way” technology that enhances its tactical advantage by remotely providing situational awareness, force protection, and deployment of offensive actions and strategic maneuvers. Although unmanned platforms have been proven in theater, they are controlled by closed and proprietary architectures. The military must contend with non-interoperable assets. Complementary technological advancements in sensors, communications, etc. can only be implemented by the OEM on its specific platform. The primary goal of this program is to design and produce an all-terrain, cost-effective, rugged and reliable, modular, man-portable, unmanned ground system for military operations on urbanized terrain (MOUT) with a fully open architecture control comprised of plug-and-play remotely interoperable Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) compliant components. The proposed architecture promotes third party hardware and software development and contains the required enabling technologies to support intelligent, netcentric agent collaboration among unmanned systems. The final program objective entails the development and integration of enhanced teleoperation capabilities and semi-autonomous control strategies to increase awareness and alleviate the operator from tedious navigational tasks. The system will be interoperable with other JAUS compliant systems to ensure interoperability of assets, leveraging of technology that can be shared among assets, and encourage third party integration of hardware and software enhancements.