ABSTRACT

Effective military use of unmanned vehicles (UVs) will depend on coordination of large teams. Automating an aircraft squadron, for example, would not only require automating the piloting of planes, but also leadership functions, support roles, and incidental forms of cooperation such as battle damage assessment (BDA) or escort functions. To illustrate anticipated scales, one scenario proposed by RAND (Vick et al., 2000) attack transporter-erector-launchers (TELs), using low-cost autonomous attack system (LOCAAS), calls for the use of up to 1,000 uninhabited aerial vehicles (UAVs) in a massed attack. In this chapter we develop three key ideas for making human control of large UV teams possible:

a conjecture that the difficulty of an operator’s task can be predicted by command complexity, a metric that assigns greatest difficulty to coordination;

a measure for coordination demand based on extending existing neglect tolerance metrics from multirobot control;

existing multiagent coordination algorithms that could provide a mechanism for making large UV teams controllable.