Distributed Autonomous Cooperative Control (DACC) for a Team of Tactical UAVs

"Distributed autonomous cooperative control is required to realize the full potential of autonomous assets in a tactical operational setting. For a tactical battlespace, there are many levels of applications requiring cooperative control. This researchaddresses the mission control level where the control task is to coordinate multiple heterogeneous distributed assets to achieve the desired global effect through the application of local force. As part of the Phase I proof, ALPHATECH coordinated with bothAFRL's Control Science Center of Excellence and DARPA/USAF's Unmanned Combat Air Vehicle (UCAV) Program Office to focus this research on a relevant UCAV cooperative control problem. With this government coordination, ALPHATECH developed and demonstratedinnovative Approximate Dynamic Programming (ADP) distributed control strategies that produce near-optimal control strategies in real-time for an operationally relevant UCAV scenario. Given this success, the focus of the proposed Phase II effort is toextend the Phase I proof-of-concept distributed autonomous cooperative controllers into three primary directions: scenario complexity, modeling complexity, and controller complexity. With these extensions, the goal of this Phase II research is to developa robust product that can then be transitioned to the USAF's UCAV Demonstration System (UDS) and ultimately to the UCAV Operation System (UOS)."