TeamSCOUT: Smart Coordination of UAV Teams for Manned-Unmanned Operations

Stottler Henke proposes to design and develop TeamSCOUT, building on our system for Smart Coordination of UAV Teams (SCOUT), and applying it to manned-unmanned teaming (MUM-T) in Navy EW operations.  Specifically, TeamSCOUT brings together a unique set of automated technologies applied to unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for the first time, combining adaptive tasking and autonomous routing with advanced electronic warfare (EW) capabilities to detect, characterize, and counteract enemy radars, while coordinating with and ultimately protecting manned platforms.  The TeamSCOUT concept involves software running on each UAV and manned platform with a minimal computing footprint, using the existing, tested SCOUT architecture.  It applies artificial intelligence techniques to enable distributed decision-making with localized radar threat characterization and countermeasure decisions as part of a MUM-T system.  A probabilistic roadmap approach is incorporated for rapid path planning in autonomous UAV team maneuvers.  Our team blends Stottler Henke’s expertise in coordinated, autonomous UAV team tasking with our subcontractor Vadum’s existing intelligent EW analysis and reasoning capabilities for automated threat radar characterization.  The Phase I effort focuses on designing the integrated system to be developed in Phase II, through initial prototyping and limited simulation-based testing using our previously developed Multi-Agent SimulaTor (MAST).