Talking to Autonomous Drones: Command and Control Based on Hierarchical Task Decomposition

With increasing onboard intelligence and planning capabilities, autonomous unmanned aircraft system (UAS) can execute a wide spectrum of tasks ranging from low-level flight tasks to complex abstract mission tasks. Regardless of their onboard intelligence, most state-of-the-art UAS are commanded with waypoint-based command and control (C2) interfaces. However, waypoint-based interfaces are not well suited to represent mission tasks at different levels of abstraction. In this work, we address the problem of designing a C2 interface for autonomous UAS at a conceptual level. We propose a C2 interface that allows operating UAS at different levels of autonomy using task decomposition and a hierarchical data format for transmission. This interface is designed to enable transparent and consistent communication of mission tasks between the ground control station and the onboard systems. We demonstrate the application of the interface for two different UAS mission scenarios in detail. The proposed interface is designed to supersede waypoint-based C2 interfaces for the next generation of UAS providing high-level autonomy through onboard intelligence.