Command and control for Teams of Autonomous Systems and People

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. We have also elucidated several technology trends indicating that unmanned aircraft may be diverging away from operating and behaving like their manned counterparts, even though phenomena such as swarming and mission integration appear to be upon us. This stream of research seeks to stay five to ten years ahead of practice, which enables us to anticipate both issues and opportunities in an area that remains under researched: C2 of autonomous systems. In this technical report, we expand our recently enabled C2 computational modeling and simulation capability to address the properties and behaviors of next generation unmanned aircraft systems, with particular emphasis on specifying even more advanced models for computational experimentation. After summarizing important background information, we describe in turn the research method, key results, conclusions and our agenda for continued research along these lines.Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER)Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER).Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited