Control of Cooperative Engagements with Robust and Distributed Optimization (Concerto(TM))

Toyon Research Corporation proposes to develop decision and control algorithms for cooperative agents operating under an intermittent asynchronous communication network. Agents will be expected to perform a variety of cooperative missions such as persistent intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), target search, acquisition, and tracking, area denial, attack, and battle damage assessment under dynamically-varying bandwidth limitations, intermittent communications, and limited information. Two key features of the proposed cooperative control system include (1) the use of an estimator-based distributed architecture allowing each UAV to internally model the actions of the others, and (2) the introduction of a communications index to scale the algorithms from centralized control to distributed control. The estimator-based distributed architecture models a centralized design by attempting to compute the control actions for each individual agent as a function of the agents' positions and the global information state (GIS). The communication index permits our control algorithms to transition from a completely centralized solution to a decentralized one based on the information rate available to each agent within the cooperative network. The performance of the system will be guaranteed to degrade gracefully with the level of information available to each agent. Toyon will implement the algorithms developed under this effort in its SLAMEMT simulation and will demonstrate their effectiveness under varying levels of information throughput. In Phase I, Toyon will use a simple cooperative search and attack scenario to demonstrate the performance of the system in real-time. Bandwidth limitations, time delays with uncertain intervals, and network topology limitations will be incorporated into the simulation. The extent of reliable communications required to ensure robust cooperative control will be evaluated. In Phase II, Toyon will improve the algorithms and simulation models and will demonstrate the real-time operation of the concept for an Air Force approved scenario.