Swarms, Colonies, and Human Organizations: Towards a Science of Managed Bio-Inspired Collectives
Abstract
Swarms, Colonies, and Human Organizations: Towards a Science of Managed Bio-Inspired Collectives. The future US Navy will increasingly incorporate unmanned autonomous systems, which will include spatial and collective swarms (de ned below). While a number of recent and on-going e orts are focused on under- standing the potential uses and CONOPS for such vehicles, little is understood about how to integrate these technologies into a shrinking manned Naval eet. These reduced Naval human organizations will need to si- multaneously share and command their shared resources to achieve multiple complex, potentially competing mission objectives. This proposal addresses reduced Naval organizations by facilitating the convergence of two very di erent research areas: bio-inspired collectives and human organizations. On one hand, a nascent science of bio- inspired collectives is emerging, including understanding how they behave and how to model them. On the other hand, the science of human organizations is relatively mature. At the intersection of these two elds, little is known about how to couple a collective to an organization, particularly when more than one member of the organization can in uence the collective, when no single member of the organization has a complete understanding of what is occurring in the collective, and when the various entities (both human and arti cial agents) may be disadvantaged due to possessing stale or incomplete information. Much current thinking about distributed robot collectives assume that a single human will manage the collective using supervisory control. This assumption signi cantly reduces the resiliency of an inherently distributed system and introduces a single point of failure, namely the human supervisor. We propose a major shift from the single-operator assumption, namely that an organization is better able to manage a distributed system than an individual. An organization removes the single point of failure and replaces it with a concept of operations in which the distributed system has distributed managers. We propose to develop the underlying theory and to identify e ective systems of humans and arti cial agents when these systems include both hierarchical organizations and distributed collectives. The term agents in this context can include unmanned aerial, ground, surface, and underwater vehicles, and other autonomous systems including intelligent user interfaces and decision support systems.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Nov 23, 2016
- Source ID
- N000141613025
Entities
People
- Michael A Goodrich
Organizations
- Brigham Young University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy