Routing UAVs to Co-Optimize Mission Effectiveness and Network Performance with Dynamic Programming

In support of the Air Force Research Laboratory\u27s (AFRL) vision of the layered sensing operations center, command and control intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance (C2ISR) more focus must be placed on architectures that support information systems, rather than just the information systems themselves. By extending the role of UAVs beyond simply intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) operations and into a dual-role with networking operations we can better utilize our information assets. To achieve the goal of dual-role UAVs, a concrete approach to planning must be taken. This research defines a mathematical model and a non-trivial deterministic algorithmic approach to determining UAV placement to support ad-hoc network capability, while maintaining the valuable service of surveillance activities

U.S. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVS) and Network Centric Warfare (NCW) impacts on combat aviation tactics from Gulf War I through 2007 Iraq

Unmanned, aerial vehicles (UAVs) are an increasingly important element of many modern militaries. Their success on battlefields in Afghanistan, Iraq, and around the globe has driven demand for a variety of types of unmanned vehicles. Their proven value consists in low risk and low cost, and their capabilities include persistent surveillance, tactical and combat reconnaissance, resilience, and dynamic re-tasking. This research evaluates past, current, and possible future operating environments for several UAV platforms to survey the changing dynamics of combat-aviation tactics and make recommendations regarding UAV employment scenarios to the Turkish military. While UAVs have already established their importance in military operations, ongoing evaluations of UAV operating environments, capabilities, technologies, concepts, and organizational issues inform the development of future systems. To what extent will UAV capabilities increasingly define tomorrow's missions, requirements, and results in surveillance and combat tactics? Integrating UAVs and concepts of operations (CONOPS) on future battlefields is an emergent science. Managing a transition from manned- to unmanned and remotely piloted aviation platforms involves new technological complexity and new aviation personnel roles, especially for combat pilots. Managing a UAV military transformation involves cultural change, which can be measured in decades.http://archive.org/details/usunmannedaerial109454211Turkish Air Force authors.Approved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Joint Unmanned Combat Air System Matching Mission Requirements, Performance Capabilities, and Critical Aviation Systems

The Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems (J-UCAS) acquisition program is a joint Air Force and Navy effort led by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) to demonstrate a networked system of unmanned combat air vehicles (UCAV) to effectively and affordably prosecute 21st century combat missions. The potential of these weapon systems to perform dangerous combat missions at a relatively low-cost and low-risk has garnered significant interest from both Congress and the Department of Defense (DoD) and raised expectations that the J-UCAS will replace some of the DoD’s aging tactical aircraft fleet. This paper will address the requirement for the DoD and Armed Services to collectively resolve a new vision and clear strategy for the integration of unmanned combat air vehicles into the Armed Forces and the future battlespace. The DoD and Armed Services continue to struggle among themselves and with defense contractors to match resources and requirements in the development of individual “service-centric” UCAVs for specific mission areas. The current vision and strategy of the J-UCAS program is derived from an initial assessment of the cost and risk benefits of UCAV development. The failure of this approach is that it will not yield a UCAV with a distinct strategic and operational advantage. This research will trace the evolution of the current J-UCAS acquisition program. A systems-engineering approach will be applied to a reassessment of the desired J-UCAS mission requirements and corresponding performance capabilities that will serve to guide the development of critical aviation systems in the context of current and emerging technologies. It was concluded that while the J-UCAS program should remain a joint effort, the United States Air Force (USAF) should be given the priority on developing and fielding the first operational joint UCAV weapon system. Future J-UCAS weapon systems should be designed to operate in a joint environment within the emerging global command and control architecture in coordination with manned aircraft. The J-UCAS must be designed with flexible, multi-mission capability to include intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance; suppression of enemy air defenses and strike. The other armed services should support this effort, but initially limit their contributions to evaluating technology demonstrators that primarily focus on interoperability in each of their respective combat environments until such time as the first operational UCAV program has successfully proven its combat effectiveness

Using a Multiobjective Approach to Balance Mission and Network Goals within a Delay Tolerant Network Topology

This thesis investigates how to incorporate aspects of an Air Tasking Order (ATO), a Communications Tasking Order (CTO), and a Network Tasking Order (NTO) within a cognitive network framework. This was done in an effort to aid the commander and or network operator by providing automation for battlespace management to improve response time and potential inconsistent problem resolution. In particular, autonomous weapon systems such as unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) were the focus of this research This work implemented a simple cognitive process by incorporating aspects of behavior based robotic control principles to solve the multi-objective optimization problem of balancing both network and mission goals. The cognitive process consisted of both a multi-move look ahead component, in which the future outcomes of decisions were estimated, and a subsumption decision making architecture in which these decision-outcome pairs were selected so they co-optimized the dual goals. This was tested within a novel Air force mission scenario consisting of a UAV surveillance mission within a delay tolerant network (DTN) topology. This scenario used a team of small scale UAVs (operating as a team but each running the cognitive process independently) to balance the mission goal of maintaining maximum overall UAV time-on-target and the network goal of minimizing the packet end-to-end delays experienced within the DTN. The testing was accomplished within a MATLAB discrete event simulation. The results indicated that this proposed approach could successfully simultaneously improve both goals as the network goal improved 52% and the mission goal improved by approximately 6%

Networking and Application Interface Technology for Wireless Sensor Network Surveillance and Monitoring

Distributed unattended ground sensor networks used in battlefield surveillance and monitoring missions, have proven to be valuable in providing a tactical information advantage required for command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance planning. Operational effectiveness for surveillance missions can be enhanced further through network centric capability, where distributed UGS networks have the ability to perform surveillance operations autonomously. NCC operation can be enhanced through UGSs having the ability to evaluate their awareness of the current joint surveillance environment, in order to provide the necessary adaptation to dynamic changes. NCC can also provide an advantage for UGS networks to self-manage their limited operational resources efficiently, according to mission objective priority. In this article, we present a cross-layer approach and highlight techniques that have potential to enable NCC operation within a mission-orientated UGS surveillance setting

Airborne Directional Networking: Topology Control Protocol Design

This research identifies and evaluates the impact of several architectural design choices in relation to airborne networking in contested environments related to autonomous topology control. Using simulation, we evaluate topology reconfiguration effectiveness using classical performance metrics for different point-to-point communication architectures. Our attention is focused on the design choices which have the greatest impact on reliability, scalability, and performance. In this work, we discuss the impact of several practical considerations of airborne networking in contested environments related to autonomous topology control modeling. Using simulation, we derive multiple classical performance metrics to evaluate topology reconfiguration effectiveness for different point-to-point communication architecture attributes for the purpose of qualifying protocol design elements

Share the Sky: Concepts and Technologies That Will Shape Future Airspace Use

The airspace challenge for the United States is to protect national sovereignty and ensure the safety and security of those on the ground and in the air, while at the same time ensuring the efficiency of flight, reducing the costs involved, protecting the environment, and protecting the freedom of access to the airspace. Many visions of the future NAS hold a relatively near-term perspective, focusing on existing uses of the airspace and assuming that new uses will make up a small fraction of total use. In the longer term, the skies will be filled with diverse and amazing new air vehicles filling our societal needs. Anticipated new vehicles include autonomous air vehicles acting both independently and in coordinated groups, unpiloted cargo carriers, and large numbers of personal air vehicles and small-scale point-to-point transports. These vehicles will enable new capabilities that have the potential to increase societal mobility, transport freight at lower cost and with lower environmental impact, improve the study of the Earth s atmosphere and ecosystem, and increase societal safety and security by improving or drastically lowering the cost of critical services such as firefighting, emergency medical evacuation, search and rescue, border and neighborhood surveillance, and the inspection of our infrastructure. To ensure that uses of the airspace can continue to grow for the benefit of all, a new paradigm for operations is needed: equitably and safely sharing the airspace. This paper is an examination of such a vision, concentrating on the operations of all types of air vehicles and future uses of the National Airspace. Attributes of a long-term future airspace system are provided, emerging operations technologies are described, and initial steps in research and development are recommended