The power of collaborative systems
The power of collaborative systems
The current proliferation of combat systems involving warfighter and robot collaboration represents a major revolution in battlefield technology. But while sensor and platform capabilities of unmanned systems have continued to advance, there has been relatively little standardization in their architecture. As a result, composing behaviors for unmanned platforms remains a highly technical task, requiring skilled programmers to create architecture-specific and platform-specific behavior implementations.
In this seminal DARPA-sponsored SBIR Phase I project, which became the basis for much of our subsequent work in human-robotic C2 and performance evaluation systems, we addressed the problem. of robot behavior composition. Specifically, we created and demonstrated an “agent behavior language” that allows tactically proficient but technically naïve authors and commanders to rapidly compose war-fighting behaviors for autonomous unmanned vehicles (UV). The Composable Command Language (CCL) transforms the process of reusable behavior definition and synthesis by obviating the programmer and empowering the military tactician to rapidly design battlefield behaviors for heterogeneous robotic entities across multiple architecture platforms through a common set of tools and interfaces.
Our innovative approach was to adapt and expand the validated OneSAF methodology for controlling virtual robots in interactive simulations to support authoring combat instructions that control semi-autonomous UVs in the real world. The resultant agent language and tool set integrate doctrine-aware representational knowledge, multi-agent coordination, deliberative control, and lower-level reactive behaviors to create a layered tactical controller. This layered controller provides for high-level tasking of heterogeneous unmanned vehicle teams with varying levels of autonomy, using a common command and control paradigm. The architectural design includes a common API to support tools transfer across agent classes and configurations. The design is tactician-centric in that behavior composition is enabled with standard command verbiage and semantics through a cognitively efficient user interface.
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