Interoperability for Autonomy (Preprint)
Abstract
Autonomous systems aim to augment human capabilities with machine-based decision-making in the absence of a user. Ideally, autonomy hardware and software would be modular with the ability to add/remove capabilities based on the specific system needs. However, many legacy systems utilize proprietary software with specific standards and components, which decreases the systems ability to be interoperable. Currently, the literature's definition of interoperability is vague and often mistaken for other similar terms. We distinguish the uniqueness of interoperability and codify it through a taxonomy. Next, we extend this framework to understand autonomy and its hardware/software components through a proposed unified autonomy stack. Four autonomy architectures are evaluated for their interoperability based on 29 stack components. Then, the architecture's similarity to one another is evaluated and presented in an interchangeability matrix. Thus, we demonstrate how the proposed taxonomy and stack can be utilized to facilitate the development of future autonomous systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Aug 24, 2023
- Accession Number
- AD1209177
Entities
People
- James Pennington
- Kara Combs
- Trevor J Bihl
Organizations
- Air Force Research Laboratory