A Command Language for Composable War Fighting Behaviors Of Autonomous Unmanned Vehicles In The Future Battle Space

Unmanned Combat Systems including robotic unmanned vehicles (UVs) are increasingly being deployed to improve the survivability, lethality and sustainability of combat operations. Two factors are critical to the exploitation of UV war-fighting power: acapability for commanders to specify and insert tactical behaviors which can be autonomously instantiated by the UVs as effective war-fighting partners; and a schema for collaborating and supervising the UV forces in battle. Our objective is to exercisethe complementary cognitive functions of human and machine to forge a fighting entity with capabilities superior to that of human or machine in isolation. Our innovative approach is to leverage and build on the prior investment of tens of millions ofdollars in a command architecture, language and tools for robotic forces that has been made in connection with the DARPA-sponsored SIMNET program and its Distributed Interactive Simulation (DIS) successors. Building on this strong base, we will developontology of war fighting behaviors and establish semantic and communication protocols of a war fighter oriented supervisory language. We will develop design specifications for architecture and tools, select a prototypical FCS application scenario as anapplication context and conduct a proof of concept demonstration at a DIS facility. The proposed R&D program will provide robust and effective architectures, tools and processes for designing and inserting command instructions regarding tacticalbehaviors in unmanned vehicles and other robotic entities. The first product will be a set of software tools software and an agent behavior language that can be used in a variety of mobile agents applications. The software will be optimized for sale toDoD and Homeland Defense agencies as well as civil organizations that employ remote robotic agents in hostile environment such as chemical spills, forest fires, local law enforcement, etc. The product will feature innovative elements for supporting humanrobot-teams collaborating in hostile missions where a variety of complex behaviors are required. These will include (1) Authoring and control languages using command-instruction at military semantic level, and (2) Human factored graphical operatorinterfaces for the tactical control of individual and heterogeneous collectives of robotic entities to include combinations of manned and unmanned systems working interchangeably within the same command and control environment.