Reliable and Flexible Teaming of Heterogeneous Autonomous Vehicles

The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year (FY) 2016, under authority of 10 U.S.C. ¤ 2362 and the Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering (OASD(R&E)), allocated $28 million to assist Historically Black Colleges and Universities and Minority-Serving Institutions (HBCU/MI) with equipment and instrumentation enhancements to improve their research and education capabilities in scientific disciplines important to the defense mission. The program aims enhance the capacity of HBCU/MI to participate broadly in defense research programs and activities and to increase the number of graduates, including underrepresented minorities, in fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). This proposal requests funding for the acquisition of an advanced mobile robotic platform to conduct an integrated research, education, and outreach program on reliable and effective autonomous cooperative control and coordination of autonomous vehicles interacting with human operators. The platform will consist of (a) a hardware-in-the-loop simulator for cooperative control of autonomous vehicles and (b) a heterogeneous team of autonomous unmanned aerial and ground vehicles with different capabilities and maneuverability. This proposal outlines the following two main objectives: The first objective is to develop an advanced robotic platform to enhance autonomy-related research capabilities at North Carolina A&T State University (N.C. A&T) in technical areas of interest to the DoD. The PIs are currently leading a DoD Center of Excellence in Autonomy to conduct basic research on modeling, control, testing, and evaluation of large teams of autonomous ground/air and unmanned/manned vehicles, integrated with human operators and warfighters in a complex, highly dynamic, uncertain, and adversarial operational environment such as a battlefield. This equipment funding, therefore, will further enhance and elevate our capabilities to verify the developed techniques at this DoD Center, thus improving the Technology Readiness Level (TRL) of our developed techniques while facilitating collaborating with N.C. A&T researchers, local and national industries and laboratories. By using this testbed, the PIs will be able to investigate the development of reliable, dynamic, and reconfigurable techniques for adaptive tactical reasoning, task/resource allocation and distributed planning for teaming of autonomous vehicles that can adaptively respond to changes in the environment or the mission, while effectively and proactively interacting with the human operators and soldiers. The second objective is to enhance the STEM education program at N.C. A&T (a) through the engagement of young talent in engineering and graduate students in research efforts related to this advanced robotic system; (b) by involving early career researchers and undergraduate students in test-bed and algorithm development for robotic research; and (c) through interactions with high school/middle school students to seed early interest in robotic systems. Furthermore, using this platform, the PIs will develop basic and advanced laboratory-based courses, tutorials, and workshops on robotics that will leverage the graduate and undergraduate programs at N.C. A&T and promote academic/industry/government collaborations.