The Use of Swarming Unmanned Vehicles to Support Target
Forthcoming in Proceedings of SPIE Defense & Security Conference, March 2008, Orlando, FL Distributed Pheromone-Based Swarming Control of Unmanned Air and Ground Vehicles for RSTA John A. Sauter, Robert S. Joshua S. Robinson, John Stephanie Riddle Mathews, Andrew Yinger* Moody† Naval Air Systems NewVectors Augusta Systems, Inc. Command (NAVAIR) 3520 Green Ct 3592 Collins Ferry Road 48150 Shaw Road Ann Arbor, MI 48105 Suite 200 Bldg. 2109 Suite S211-21 Morgantown, WV 26505 Patuxent River, MD 20670 Abstract The use of unmanned vehicles in Reconnaissance, Surveillance, and Target Acquisition (RSTA) applications has received considerable attention recently. Cooperating land and air vehicles can support multiple sensor modalities providing pervasive and ubiquitous broad area sensor coverage. However coordination of multiple air and land vehicles serving different mission objectives in a dynamic and complex environment is a challenging problem. Swarm intelligence algorithms, inspired by the mechanisms used in natural systems to coordinate the activities of many entities provide a promising alternative to traditional command and control approaches. This paper describes recent advances in a fully distributed digital pheromone algorithm that has demonstrated its effectiveness in managing the complexity of swarming unmanned systems. The results of a recent demonstration at NASA’s Wallops Island of multiple Aerosonde Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) and Pioneer Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs) cooperating in a coordinated RSTA application are discussed. The vehicles were autonomously controlled by the onboard digital pheromone responding to the needs of the automatic target recognition algorithms. UAVs and UGVs controlled by the same pheromone algorithm self-organized to perform total area surveillance, automatic target detection, sensor cueing, and automatic target recognition with no central processing or control and minimal operator input.
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