Smart COordination of UAV Teams (SCOUT)

The ultimate goal is to allow autonomous UAV teams to autonomously make decisions and coordinate their efforts in an intelligent and resilient way. This will require intelligent real-time information-sharing, planning, role allocation, and detailed path planning and autonomous, intelligent, adaptive behavior by the UAVs. The proposed system is based on our existing SCOUT architecture, which has already been demonstrated on actual flying UAVs and which includes the concept of a “play,” similar to plays in sports and suggested by real-time decision-makers themselves. In Phase I, we will adapt SCOUT to Navy domains, including emitter finding with passive-RF sensors, adapting and developing new required AI techniques to automate all aspects of intelligently, automatically selecting appropriate plays, robustly assigning roles and planning routes, and adaptively executing each role, robustly and predictably in diverse environments, including intelligent information sharing to accomplish a nearly common operational picture (NCOP) with limited and intermittent communications. We will design the ultimate system and, to absolutely prove its feasibility, prototype all aspects of it in Phase I based on our current SCOUT architecture and demonstrate it on real, flying UAVs in Phase I. We will also investigate integration with RAIDER, representative sensors, and UAVs.