UAV autonomy for complex environments

Complexity is a dominant, multi-dimensional attribute of the battlespace, and is evident in the geography, manmade infrastructure, force asymmetry and organizational processes. The Unmanned Aerial Vehicle represents a strategic enabler for military operations in complex environments by providing a flexible means of acquiring real-time information and deriving actionable knowledge. Limitations arising from remotely piloted UAV operation together with the desired operational flexibility in complex environments both dictate the need for increasingly autonomous UAV operation within a rigorous airspace integration framework. UAV autonomy relies primarily on access to missioncritical information from on-board sensors and networked datalink, together with comprehensive, efficient and robust algorithms for decisions on course of action. Global battlefield networking extends the notion of individual vehicle operation to a coordinated team, whose members carry out complementary and/or redundant tasks. DRDC research on cooperative teaming of UAVs covers in particular the development and implementation of cooperative control based on model predictive control. In the context of operations in complex environments, the present paper discusses the selected approach to cooperative control, and presents applications to formation flight, collision avoidance, real-time implementation and multi-processing, and fault-detection, isolation and recovery.