Applying DDDAS Principles to Command, Control and Mission Planning for UAV Swarms

Government agencies predict ever-increasing inventories of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs). Sizes will vary from current manned aircraft scales to miniature, micro, millimeter scales or smaller. Missions for UAVs will increase, especially for the 3-D missions: dull, dirty, and dangerous. As their numbers and missions increase, three important challenges will emerge for these large swarms of sensor and surveillance UAVs: (1) the need for near real-time dynamic command & control of the swarms, (2) efficient mission planning and dynamic real-time re-tasking of the swarms, and 3) the need for improved automation of swarm mission planning and command & control. We describe an investigation with the primary objectives to design, develop, and evaluate: (i) a proof-of-concept simulation test-bed that investigates the benefits of using DDDAS (Dynamic Data Driven Applications Systems) for UAV swarm control, and (ii) engineering guidelines that will enable the use of DDDAS principles in such actual systems.