End-to-End Scalable Collaboration for Autonomous Systems with Highly Disadvantaged Communications
Abstract
End-to-End Scalable Collaboration for Autonomous Systems with Highly Disadvantaged Communications Principal Investigator: Leonardo Bobadilla Institution: Florida International University Naval TPoC: Marc Steinberg (Department Code 351), Science of Autonomy Program Officer --Abstract: (PUBLICLY RELEASABLE) Intelligent Autonomous Systems (IAS), including Unmanned Aerial Systems (UASs),Unmanned Surface Vehicles (USVs), and Unmanned Underwater Vehicles (UUVs) will be the backbone of fundamental missions of interest for the Navy. They perform crucial actions such as port monitoring, mine countermeasures, electronic warfare, and ISR (Intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) activities. However, IAS mission execution can be hindered by communication-constrained environments. An example in the context of missions of Navy interest is underwater environments, where traditional communication modalities (e.g., RF and acoustic) have limitations. Another example is adversarial events during deployments in littoral missions, such as jamming and blocking, which can reduce the available bandwidth. We propose a research agenda to enable IAS to function robustly and resiliently despite communication challenges in diverse scenarios and conditions. We aim to address three research questions: 1) How can IAS solve tasks under extreme low-bandwidth conditions? 2)How can IAS teams plan missions using different communication modalities with rich geometry and water channel communication models? 3) How can we reduce the time and risks in IAS team deployments in coastal environments? We will address these questions through three research thrusts. Thrust 1: Solving Autonomy Tasks with Sublinear Communication; Thrust 2: Novel multi-robot control approaches based on emerging communication modalities; and Thrust 3: Sim-to-Scale-to-Real for Heterogeneous IAS Network sand Experimental Study Case. Expected outcomes include new formulations, algorithms, implementations, scientific publications, software packages, models, hardware prototypes, and experimental workflows and demonstrations. In this proposal#s student participation aspect, the effort will directly support two Ph.D. Students and two undergraduate students at Florida International University that will work together with the PI to develop the proposed research activities. Additionally, curricular and co-curricular educational activities will help create a pipeline of students that will potentially follow careers in IAS and join DoD and Navy positions.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Aug 11, 2023
- Source ID
- N000142312789
Entities
People
- Leonardo Bobadilla
Organizations
- Florida International University
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy