Autonomy and Unmanned Systems
Strategic Drivers: Increased proliferation of inexpensive lethal threats targeting individual warfighters and high-value assets, combined with continued rapid advances in computing, power and energy, robotics, sensors and position guidance technologies drives the requirement to augment expensive manned systems with less expensive, unmanned fully autonomous systems that can operate in all required domains.
Vision: Achieve an integrated hybrid Force of manned and unmanned systems with the ability to sense, comprehend, predict, communicate, plan, make decisions and take appropriate actions to achieve its goals. The employment of these systems will reduce risk for Sailors and Marines and increase capability.
Description: Autonomy and unmanned systems will be used in all operating domains, performing multiple missions and will be developed into numerous platforms. Central to achieving that vision is the development of a distributed system of heterogeneous unmanned systems relying on network-centric, decentralized control that is flexible in its level of autonomy with the ability to get the right level of information to the right echelon at the right time. This may include defeating asymmetric and emerging threats via persistent and stealthy distributed, large area presence; stimulation of suspect entities; and disruption and deception of potential hostiles. Additionally, this may include providing a highly survivable, self-organizing, adaptive mission capability that cannot be easily defeated just by killing individual platforms and sensors, as well as providing affordable capabilities to do things that would be unaffordable or result in impractical manning otherwise.
Objectives
Human/Unmanned Systems Collaboration
- Natural modes of interaction
- Understanding intent and recognizing deception
- Dynamically changing levels of autonomy
Perception and Intelligent Decision Making
- Autonomous adjudication between wide area exploration and exploitation of area
- Learning context, adaptive recognition and scene understanding
- Automated processing from sensor data to information to actionable understanding
Scalable and Robust Distributed Collaboration
- Task allocation/assignment, planning, coordination and control for heterogeneous systems
- Airspace/waterspace management
- Predicting behaviors of large numbers of unmanned systems
- Validation and verification of complex autonomous systems
Intelligence Enablers and Architectures
- Integrated architectures and intelligence for decentralized systems
- Reasoning and learning
- Scalable planning and re-planning
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