Projects: UACO – Part 1

Client: PercepTek, Inc

Title: Unmanned Autonomous Collaborative Operations (UACO) – Part 1

Summary: Starting in August of 2004 JHNA begun work supporting PercepTek Inc in two primary areas during both part 1 and part 2 of DARPA's and the Army's Advanced Aviation Technology directorates' UACO Science and Technology Objective (STO). Part I was an exploratory development effort intended to develop and demonstrate high value militarily relevant UAV behaviors that are scaleable across different UAV classes. Part 1 developed, integrated and will demonstrate the following UACO mission behaviors: see and avoid cooperative flight; avenge kill/team protection; cooperative reconnaissance/security; adjustment to component failures as a team; network adaptation for assured communications; surveillance on several moving targets in urban terrain; and establishment of multiple optimum observation points.

In Part 1 of the UACO STO program, JHNA provided operational concepts and requirements decomposition products as a member of the team that was ultimately down selected for Part 2 of the program. JHNA developed and refined the Design Reference Mission for the STO to both exercise and highlight operational capabilities and requirements including:

• High Level Tasking Capability
• Reconnoiter Tree Line
• Reconnoiter Area
• Follow Target
• Techniques for Automated Planning in Dynamically Changing Environment
• UAV Routes
• Activities
• Events
• Techniques to Enable Autonomous Cooperation and Collaboration Between Multiple UAV Platforms
• Architecture Enabling UAVs to perform several behaviors simultaneously
• Target Tracking
• Obstacle Avoidance
• Communications Relay Optimization
• Formation Maintenance
• Techniques to create 3D Geodetically Referenced maps
• Enable fusion of Surveillance Data across multiple platforms
• Eliminate the need for streaming video communications
• Provide the operator with a dramatically improved situational assessment capability
• Enable the handoff of tracked features from one platform to another as required by many of the identified mission behaviors
• Tracking of multiple objects in a MOUT environment with periodic occlusion, platform dynamics, and environmental motion.

Deliverables: Deliverables have included PowerPoint briefings and Microsoft Word documents with embedded graphics.

Points of Contact: Bill Huff (407) 592-7562