Advanced UAV Command & Control |
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C-CAGO Architecture
The recent successes
of the uninhabited aerial vehicle
(UAV) in U.S. armed forces missions
raise the possibility for increased
and increasingly diverse roles for
UAVs in future operations: reconnaissance,
surveillance, tracking, cooperative
search and attack, relay communications,
target identification, navigational
guidance, and more.
Advancements in technology
and computing power
also widen the potential applications
of unihabited arial vehicles (UAVs), and much research within
the scientific, commercial
and government communities has focused on UAV
technologies and the use of UAVs
for high-level strategic missions,
including the real time intelligent
planning and execution of complex
operations. This research, however,
while focusing on algorithms for
the cooperative control of a group
of entities (e.g., UAVs), has not
addressed the integration of command
and control capabilities for a group of entities
or taken advantage of advancements in communication technologies. With this
gap in mind, KBSI's C-CAGO project
designed, developed, and validated
a Command and Control module for
Active Intra-group Cooperation (C-CAGO)
of expendable UAVs.
Implementing autonomous
Command and Control (C&C) for
a group of UAVs that also enables
cooperative behavior within the
group requires sophisticated
algorithms for distributive
computing and extensive intra-group
communication. Note that UAVs
also act like sensors, and one of
the important functions of the UAVs
is to gather information by collecting
sensor data. This data must then
be processed for various uses including
real time tactical decision-making,
mission planning, and mission execution.
Both the sensor data transmission
and the C&C module for the UAVs
requires a reliable wireless communication
network that must be shared between
the two functions, thus further
limiting an already constrained
bandwidth capability.
As a consequence,
the major objective of the C-CAGO
module is to facilitate the robust tactical
performance of the group despite
the limited bandwidth constraint.
The C-CAGO module addresses the dual issue of communication
network design and the application of command and
control algorithms to achieve seamless operation between command and control while minimizing the burden on the available bandwidth.
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