A Rotorcraft Adaptation of Geneva Aerospace’s Variable Autonomy Control System

As Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are playing a larger part in military urban activities, the need for command and control of multiple diverse assets has arisen. This need extends the concept of UAV control to the command and control of teams of heterogeneous vehicles with varying capabilities working together to achieve a common goal. The task of getting the vehicles to work together burdens the UAV operator with designing individual sub-tasks for each platform, where the combination of these sub-tasks produces the overall desired results. To reduce the operator workload for mission planning and re-planning, higher-level mission managers have been designed to plan and re-plan missions based on updated battlespace information. The Playbook application, developed by Smart Information Flow Technologies (SIFT), is an example of such an automated high level mission manager. The object of the Playbook application is to replace the operator actions by designing appropriate sub-tasks for a collection of heterogeneous vehicles, which will combine to perform the required objective. The application determines which platforms are available and how they and their sensors should be used to perform the specified mission. The methodology is analogous to a team calling a ‘play’ where all individuals have responsibilities. This ‘play’ is then executed with the available resources, and should some unforeseen event occur, an ‘audible’ is called to re-plan the mission or alter it within predetermined parameters. The role of the Variable Autonomy Control System in this design is to provide a common command and control interface for the Playbook application. The VACS ground control station provides a single node for the Playbook application to view all vehicle state data and send commands to individual vehicles. The VACS controller will either be implemented or emulated on each of the vehicles in the environment, allowing the Playbook to issue similar commands to each of the various platforms. This relieves the burden of the Playbook understanding every vehicle’s command and control interface, and allows the insertion of more types of vehicles, as they become VACS compliant.