Vehicle Swarm Rapid Prototyping Testbed

Abstract

Increased levels of vehicle collaboration and autonomy are seen as a means to reduce overall mission completion costs while expanding mission capabilities and increasing mission assurance for complex coupled system of systems. Systems health management technologies have made rapid advances that enable systems to know their own condition and capabilities, thus creating the opportunity for unprecedented levels of adaptive control, real-time reconfiguration, and mission contingency management. Multi-agent task allocation and mission managements systems must account for vehicle- and system-level health-related issues to ensure that these systems are reliable and cost effective to operate. Boeing’s Vehicle Swarm Technology Lab (VSTL), established in 2004, includes a 100’x50’x20 ’ testbed equipped with a vision-based motion capture indoor localization system. The testbed provides a cost-effective rapid prototyping capability for integrating health-based adaptive control of subsystems, vehicle, mission, and swarms to guarantee top-level system-of-systems performance metrics. The lab’s heterogeneous fleet includes over 20 heterogeneous air vehicles, including VTOL and fixed wing, along with their ground stations and communication links in addition to heterogeneous ground vehicles and wall climbing robots. This paper discusses the Boeing VSTL design and capabilities, including the indoor localization system, multi-vehicle command and control (C2) and operator interface, real-time virtual environment, and health-based adaptive behaviors. The lab supports rapid prototyping and exploration of various multi-vehicle operational concept of operations and missions including persistent surveillance, area search and tracking, and high density air traffic management. Additionally, the lab supports experimentation tasks for many other platform configuration and collaborative air, ground, space, and maritime autonomous system of systems concepts. Nomenclature