Command and control models of next generation unmanned aircraft systems

Abstract

The technologic capabilities of autonomous systems (AS) continue to accelerate, and integrated performance by AS and people working together can be superior to that of either AS or people working alone. We refer to this increasingly important phenomenon as Teams of Autonomous Systems and People (TASP), and through our recent research—representing the current state of the art—we have demonstrated computational experimentation capability in the TASP domain. The problem is, several technology trends suggest that unmanned aircraft may be diverging away from operating and behaving like their manned counterparts, suggesting that some of our most futuristic model assumptions may be off target. This is where our ongoing research project begins to make an important contribution by investigating the next generation of autonomous systems. In this technical report, we motivate and introduce such TASP research, and we provide an overview of the computational environment used to experiment on TASP command and control organizations and phenomena. We summarize in turn the research method. Key results follow, and we conclude then by summarizing our agenda for continued research along these lines.