Resilient Communications for Contested Autonomous Manned/Unmanned Teaming and Bounded Autonomy

Collaborative military engagements with integrated systems across multiple disparate platforms such as Manned/Unmanned Teaming (M/UM-T) require resilient communications to achieve desired effects against enemy threats. The potential benefit of M/UM-T systems can be fully realized if Command and Control, flight control, shared situational awareness, sensor/electronic warfare, targeting, weapon system and a host of other mission-critical data and information are exchanged with extremely high reliability among all the engaged assets in real-time throughout a mission. Existing tactical communication systems, however, are not well suited to support the M/UM-T requirements nor to exploit the full potentials in a constantly maneuvering environment. We are developing the Resilient Communications for Autonomous and Scalable Manned/Unmanned Teaming with Bounded Autonomy (ReCAST) to address these challenges in a unified framework, and propose to demonstrate its feasibility under realistic M/UM-T scenarios. The goal of ReCAST is to enable all engaged assets with disparate capabilities to exchange just the right amount of information by dynamically and intelligently allocating communication resources between the engaged manned/unmanned assets even when they are under the most pressing situations by enabling individual assets to persistently make the right “decision� on when to communicate what with whom based on the local and global network status.