George Galdorisi

Airborne Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

Airborne Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Opportunities Military, intelligence, and industry officials are universal in their praise for airborne (as well as other) autonomous systems. These systems have been used extensively in the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and are already creating strategic, operational, and tactical possibilities that did not exist a decade ago. However, while these autonomous systems are of enormous value today and are evolving to deliver better capabilities to the warfighter, it is their promise for the future that causes the most excitement. These leading edge – and indeed, revolutionary, systems – offer unprecedented potential to be the game-changers that will provide tomorrow’s military with heretofore unimagined capability. Indeed, these systems have created a substantial “buzz” in policy, military, industry and academic circles and have even spawned best-selling books such as P.W. Singer’s Wired for War, as well as innumerable articles in professional journals and magazines, as well as in popular science and literature such as Wired Magazine. But for these airborne autonomous systems to reach their full potential, important C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) considerations must be addressed. Currently, there is far too much discussion of “brawn” and not enough “brains,” that is, an almost exclusive focus on platforms and little discussion or focus on the command and control aspects of these truly magnificent systems. The science of building unmanned air, ground, surface, and underwater vehicles is welladvanced. But with the very real prospect of future flat or declining military budgets, the rapidly rising costs of military manpower and the new DoD and DoN emphasis on total operating costs, the mandate to move beyond the “one-man, one-joystick, one-vehicle” paradigm that has existed during the past decades of airborne autonomous systems development is both clear and compelling. This means getting the C4ISR piece “right.” We maintain that failure to move beyond this “one-man, one-joystick, one-vehicle” status quo will impede or even derail the development of future airborne autonomous systems. We will then present examples of ground-breaking work going on in the DoD laboratory community (such as the Unmanned Vehicle Sentry (UV-Sentry) System and the Multi-Robot Operator Control Unit (MOCU) System) that is paving the way for a completely new paradigm – multiple airborne autonomous systems controlled by one operator – providing their own command and control and self-synchronization as the “way ahead” for future airborne autonomous systems. This proposed solution set will make airborne autonomous systems even greater contributors to the success of Naval Aviation than they are today. Our paper will also build upon and leverage recent work on autonomous systems conducted by the Chief of Naval Operations Strategic Studies Group. Airborne Autonomous Systems: Challenges and Opportunities

Bridging the Policy and Technology Gap : A Process to Instantiate Maritime Domain Awareness

The twin imperatives of pursuing the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) and defending the U.S. Homeland have placed in increasingly strong premium on obtaining a detailed knowledge of the maritime domain, what has come to be known as Maritime Domain Awareness (MDA). In a recent speech, the Commandant of the U.S. Coast Guard put the importance of MDA in these terms, “Global Maritime Domain Awareness will allow us to detect, surveill, identify, classify, and interdict vessels of interest. Global MDA gives us the cued intel that will provide the situational awareness and clarity necessary to determine if a vessel is friend or foe.” This challenge has been addressed by the United States Government in a number of policy documents, most importantly, the National Strategy for Maritime Security and The National Plan to Improve Maritime Domain Awareness. These documents highlight the importance of MDA both as a challenge and an opportunity. The importance of MDA to homeland defense was highlighted in a public statement by the Assistant Secretary of Defense of Homeland Security who noted, “It seems to me that it is in the maritime domain that we have the greatest potential to substantially improve our homeland defense.” While the policy imperatives of achieving MDA are strong and straightforward and while the concept of operations to put this into effect is already evolving, the technical challenges to achieving the requisite degree of MDA to pursue the GWOT and defend the U.S. Homeland and the homeland territory of other nations are significant.

Access to the oceans: How creeping jurisdictional claims can lead to disorder on the oceans

This case study of territorial claims and EEZ disputes in the South China highlights the key issues at stake with regard to jurisdictional claims more broadly. It also suggests a three-part strategy for the United States to adopt in providing stability and the chance of fair resolution in these types of disputes. First, the United States should continue to protect high seas freedom for all through both diplomacy and demonstration. Second, it should continue to work with rival nations to help them recognize that their long-term interest in high seas freedom, and especially freedom of navigation, is far more important to their national security than short-term efforts to control navigation in the EEZ. Third, the United States should continue to promote regional resolution of jurisdictional claims based on the principles of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS).

Bridging multiple autonomous vehicle disciplines: Ensuring autonomous systems promote peace and stability on the world's oceans

In 2011, then-Undersecretary of the Navy (now-Deputy Secretary of Defense) Robert Work established the Naval Postgraduate School Consortium for Robotics and Unmanned Systems Education and Research (CRUSER). The impetus behind establishing this organization was to create and nourish a collaborative environment and community of interest for the advancement of unmanned systems (UxS) education and research endeavors across the Navy, Marine Corps, and Department of Defense. CRUSER represents an initiative designed to build an inclusive community of interest around the application of UxS in military operations. CRUSER seeks to catalyze these efforts, both internal and external to NPS, by facilitating active means of collaboration, providing a mechanism for information exchange among researchers and educators with collaborative interests. This process is designed to foster innovation through directed programs of operational experimentation, and supporting the development of an array of educational ventures. This paper will present the results of CRUSERs most recent academic and field experimentation work, especially its ongoing swarm vs. swarm work in calendar year 2106. We believe this insiders look at the way the U.S. military is coordinating its autonomous systems work across a wide-array of disciplines will suggest a way-ahead to the autonomous community writ large.

Heterogeneous Autonomous Mobile Maritime Expeditionary Robots

For the ONR-funded Heterogeneous Adaptive Maritime Mobile Expeditionary Robots (HAMMER) project, we work on cooperative autonomy for a fleet of unmanned vehicles working together in the aerial, water surface, and underwater domains. Each of these systems work well independently, but our goal is to integrate their performance into one system of vehicles that can safely perform cooperative tasks. The challenges we are working on include creating reliable communications links between vehicles in the harsh low bandwidth maritime environment, integrating novel onboard sensors and inter-vehicle communication to create filters to estimate the state of the network, and creating autonomous takeoff-and-landing algorithms between the aerial/underwater vehicles and the surface “mothership” vehicle. The surface vehicle is envisioned to be capable of transporting the aerial and underwater vehicles as well as providing mission-lengthening power. Possible applications of this system include automated deployment and recovery of data-collecting unmanned underwater vehicles and an ad hoc wireless network where the aerial vehicle relays time-sensitive data collected from the surface or underwater vehicle to a human on a ship many miles away. In a separate but related project, we are also determining human-autonomy teaming required for future Naval programs, assessing the state-of-the-art algorithms, and creating open challenge problems to academia to fill gaps based on the Navys need.