DAF26BZ01-NV006 — Intelligent Threat Aware Autonomy

Award Maximum: $300,000 Period of Performance: 6 months Phase Type: Phase I

OBJECTIVE: The objectives are to do: 1. Weapon Engagement Zone (WEZ) Modeling: Develop models to represent the area where a weapon can effectively engage targets. This involves considering factors like weapon range, vehicle movement, and threat trajectories, to provide risk measures for path planning and weapons employment. 2. WEZ Avoidance: Develop path planning algorithms for ACPs to navigate safely through dynamic WEZs, minimizing risk while reaching objectives efficiently. This requires real-time solutions that can handle multiple static and moving threats. 3. Advanced Weaponeering: Optimize weapon usage for ACPs to maximize target capture and neutralization. This includes assigning appropriate weapons to targets, considering target movement and the overall mission context. 4. Mutual Support: Investigate how multiple ACPs can cooperate effectively in adversarial situations. This includes coordinated movement to avoid threats and collaborative weapon engagement for increased effectiveness.

DESCRIPTION: To address future Air Force strategic needs, an increasing number of advanced systems with intelligent autonomy are being envisioned. Intelligent autonomy is central to systems involving advanced automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning, adaptive control architectures, and heightened performance compared to the state of the art. A critical need for enabling these future autonomous systems are behaviors that can be leveraged by higher level cognition or mission managers to achieve collaborative mission execution for ACPs. The question that needs to be asked is, "Provided that systems have all the data available to them from sensors and mission objectives, what is it that the systems actually have to do to be successful in their mission?" It is clear that the sensing and available of data is a critical requirement for making informed decisions, this may entail a deep investigation on coupling behaviors with sensing capability; but, the focus of this effort is more toward the thinking and action than the sensing of the sense-think-act process flow. Near term objectives of this work are to invest in basic and applied research to building on the accomplished R&D, address specific identified technical challenges and tools for solving Intelligent Threat Aware Autonomy (ITA2) objectives. Far term objectives involve advanced technology development to constrict ITA2 avionics packages, perform real-time hardware and flight testing of ITA2 products, manufacture vehicles capable of performing ITA2 or hardware that interfaces with current ACPs, and flight test on Air Force / DoD commercial platforms.

Intelligent Threat Aware Autonomy (ITA2) is aimed at finding ways to take measured risks and enable autonomous systems to achieve air superiority in threat laden environments. Multiple facets of this project are to be investigated including: ways of measuring risk from ensuing threats, leveraging ownship weapon models for capturing targets of interest, avoiding adversarial threats, addressing limited communication range and navigational error, quantifying mutual support and types of mutual support, and measures of force through collaboration and teaming. Lastly, the addressing of uncertainty of own-ship(s) states, target vehicle(s) states, operations boundaries, target vehicle capability, and other forms of uncertainties such as communication delay and environmental disturbances (wind) are important for obtaining reliable and robust behaviors.

Vehicle control is performed by providing the vehicles desired aim-points or waypoint plans in three-dimensional space. The inner loop control systems of aircraft is out of scope of this work; rather, interfacing with current / existing vehicle control technologies is expected though the use of aim-points. This reduces the burden of developing the necessary vehicle control commands such as normal acceleration, roll-rate, and throttle. Furthermore, it leverages the most state of the art methods for performing vehicle control and AI enabling technologies.

PHASE I: In Phase 1, focus should be on initial developments of proposed solutions to one or more of the design challenges. Alternate solutions should be considered and the most promising approaches identified. Development and analysis in desktop simulation environments with representative aircraft platforms (kinematic or dynamic in nature) can be performed to assist transition to Phase II. Investigations in methodology and computational performance should motivate the use of flight-worthy methods in later phases. Feasibility studies should be conducted regarding proposed solution approaches. Initial design and analysis studies in desktop simulation environments should be performed. Based on initial analyses and experimental results, recommendations for further R&D and a Phase II technology development plan should be completed. Surrogate models representing Air Force platforms of interest can be used in Phase I. No government furnished data or equipment should be required. Air Force customers/stakeholders and specific Air Force technology applications of interest should be identified. These should be technologies in which advancements in ITA2 will provide significant benefit.

PHASE II: In Phase II, design details and experimental test plans should be significantly expanded. Development and analysis in higher fidelity desktop simulation environments with representative platform applications should be performed. Develop realistic use cases that exercise ITA2 functionality and demonstrate benefits or capabilities. The ITA2 system should be able to avoid adversarial threats, engage on targets of interest, and be able to quantify relevant mission parameters for a mission manager to select from available behaviors. Success will be defined by demonstrating the benefits of the advanced ITA2 technology as compared to current state of the art methods such as circumnavigation around threat regions or pure-pursuit to intended targets. Evaluation of ITA2 Technology will entail review of real-time functionality and test/demonstrate the technologies in a software/hardware integration laboratory environment. It may be valuable to repeat some or all of the capstone experiments that were performed in desktop simulations. Cost and schedule permitting, port developed real time code to flight processors and perform initial flight demonstrations with surrogate sUAS platform(s), again testing capstone experiments.

Depending on contractual arrangements, government furnished data or equipment could be provided in the form of simulation models or equipment supporting laboratory or flight testing. At this stage, systems used to demonstrate the developed ITA2 technologies should closely align with Air Force programs of interest that employ advanced, adaptive and intelligent autonomy. Technology transfer plans should be constructed showing how the developed Phase II products can directly support such programs in preparations for Phase III efforts.

PHASE III DUAL USE APPLICATIONS: In Phase III, teaming arrangements should be made with airframe/avionics manufacturers to develop/finalize ITA2 system design(s) in a pre-production phase. Required safety analysis and testing for eventual certification should be performed. Phase III activities should directly support Air Force programs of interest with flight testing and demonstrations on full scale vehicles. This program is integrating ACP technology with Autonomy Government Reference Architecture (A-GRA) missions systems to enable ACP transitions. A successful program will deliver a prototype suite of technologies to enable autonomous ACPs with enhanced capabilities for Air Force missions. However, trust in the autonomy will be paramount for close-in manned-unmanned operations and ITA2 will be a key enabling technology to provide the required level of trust in the unmanned systems.

Follow-on Phase III activities should expand applications to other branches of the military and DoD customers. Clear applications include counter uncrewed aerial system defense, cruise missile defense, high-value airborne asset defense, high-speed interception of incoming threats, suppression of enemy air defenses, destruction of enemy air defenses, combat air patrol, etc. Methods and approaches should be suitable for pre-mission planning, real-time mission execution, and wargaming to inform commander's intent. ITA2 applications should be extended to various groups of air platforms; but, group 5 systems are of particular interest to the DoD.