The Impact of Observability Constraints on the Planning for Employment of Robotic and Autonomous Systems

Employment of Robotic and Autonomous Systems requires a different paradigm of mission planning. The GTRI Missioneer for Organic Collaborative Kill-Chains (MOCKS) effort was developed to mature the concepts of mission planning in light of autonomy, where the decision making is distributed across the battlespace and each individual entity has limited awareness of global state. The paper presents some initial characterizations of the impact of constraints on periods out of communication, or no-comms windows, on the number of resources required for missions of a certain operational area. This metric, along with the foundational metric of remaining effective range margin are foundational to robust a priori planning.