DURIP Testbed to Enable Design for Autonomy and Collaboration of Physical Systems
Abstract
The Aerospace Systems Design Laboratory (ASDL) of the School of Aerospace Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Georgia Tech) is requesting DURIP funding to augment current High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities by providing an Unmanned Collaborative Research Testbed (UCRT) to design, test and validate collaboration between autonomous vehicles in real-world environments. ASDL currently has access to the computational and visualization assets required to enable design and testing of complex engineeringsystems, including Systems of Systems (SoS), as well as the experimental facilities to prototype and test small systems. The visionbehind this proposal is to enable the testing and validation of collaborative algorithms and techniques between unmanned autonomousvehicles (UAVs). UAVs have demonstrated capability of a broad range of applications across many fields and disciplines, and collaboration between these vehicles can significantly increase their utility and effectiveness. Collaboration methods and algorithms are often studied in simulation by modelling the specific vehicles or systems of the overall SoS and their respective communication properties in a given environment. If funded, the UCRT proposed in this document would furnish a suite of air, surface, and underwater vehicles as well as corresponding instrumentation and sensors to experimentally test and verify the collaborative methods being developed in simulation in real world environments relevant to defense research. The UCRT is envisioned to be a set of vehicles and instruments that can be reconfigured to test the performance and capability of a variety of SoS architectures under different collaboration methodologies. ASDL has the experience and facilities required to enable the design and prototyping of a variety of unmanned vehicles. Past efforts have included an unmanned underwater vehicle, several unmanned surface vehicles, and several unmanned aerial vehicles. A collection ofsensors and instruments related to unmanned vehicles would make operating several of these vehicles in conjunction possible, thereby enabling the study of specific collaboration algorithms between both homogenous and heterogeneous vehicles.The testbed hardware requested under this DURIP will supplement the already existing facilities at ASDL. The UCRT will be linked with the Collaborative Design Environment (CoDE), the Collaborative Visualization Environment (CoVE), the Adaptive Design, Prototyping, andExperimentation (ADePT) Facility, and the High Performance Computing (HPC) facility, which were created using previously awarded DURIP funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR) to create an environment capable of designing, prototyping, testing, experimentally verifying and visualizing the complex interactions between a collection of unmanned systems. This physical facility, coupled with validated, multi-disciplinary analysis environment libraries around systems of interest and an associated library of system of systems models that are being developed through numerous Department of Defense (DoD) and non-DoD sponsored projects, as well as a team of professional researchers spanning the necessary disciplines, enables the capability desired to be fully realized. UCRT will provide a unique physical design research capability, and can be leveraged across many defense related efforts to save time and cost and increase confidence in results. Approved for Public Release.
Document Details
- Document Type
- DoD Grant Award
- Publication Date
- Mar 15, 2024
- Source ID
- N000142412205
Entities
People
- Dimitri Mavris
Organizations
- Georgia Tech Research Corporation
- Office of Naval Research
- United States Navy