Resource Aware Mission Planner

Application of Unmanned Aerial Systems (UAS) represent a growing military and commercial sector that has the potential to revolutionize package delivery, search and rescue, surveillance, strike operations, and transportation.  Critical bottlenecks to realizing the benefits of these diverse and capable platforms are improving the efficiency with which human operators can manage groups of these assets and extending the endurance of these platforms by improving their energy efficiency.  PC Krause and Associates (PCKA) proposes to address these bottlenecks by developing the Resource Aware Mission Planner (RAMP).  RAMP will automate optimization of both the task assignment and route planning problems for groups of heterogenous UAS’s to maximize a prescribed utility function for the mission.  Here, task assignment refers to the discrete sequence of actions the UAS is commanded to perform, and the route planning problem is determining the path and speed the vehicle traverses while executing the task plan.  Inherent to the design of RAMP is recognizing the coupling between task assignment and route optimization in the mission planning problem.  With this service, PCKA will enable one operator to manage multiple platforms while maximizing their energy efficiency within the mission.  For Phase I of this proposal PCKA will generate a set of use cases that fully define the desired behavior of the RAMP service.  These use cases will then be used in Phase II to guide the technical development.