A Testbed for Investigating the UAV Swarm Command and Control Problem Using DDDAS

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) may become the future of military aviation as technology advances, especially sensors and miniaturization techniques. Currently, however, UAVs are controlled individually and require many resources, including ground-based pilots, to function. In our project, we attempt to explore how to remedy this using a Dynamic Data-Driven Application System (DDDAS) to control a group, or swarm, of UAVs. DDDAS takes real data and injects it into a running simulation, as well as allowing the running simulation to influence what real data is gathered, and as such is an ideal system to control real UAVs. We describe here how we created a testbed system that allowed two simulations to communicate data to one another using DDDAS principles, as well as the beginnings of incorporating commercially-available UAVs into the system.