Over the past decade, there has been tremendous progress in developing technologies to automate the navigation, guidance and control functionality of unmanned vehicles, including work funded by the Office of Naval Research (ONR). It is now possible to envision autonomous systems that enable one human operator or user to simultaneously manage multiple heterogeneous unmanned vehicles at a supervisory level or to enable a small group of operators to manage a much larger number of vehicles. Many current unmanned systems require one or more dedicated, highly skilled operators and significant amounts of communications bandwidth for the control of even a single unmanned system. The equipment and manpower required for each individual system greatly limits both the numbers and types of unmanned platforms that can effectively be operated from current small host platforms or by small naval units.
Intelligent autonomy (IA) consists of multiple basic and applied research efforts that
focus on a long-term vision for future unmanned systems operations. Work in this
area is highly multi-disciplinary involving fi elds as diverse as control systems, artifi cial
intelligence, biology, social science, psychology, human factors engineering, and
vehicle technologies. Basic research efforts focus on biologically inspired approaches
for unmanned system team and coalition formation for ISR of large, complex areas,
motive and affect-based unmanned systems control, and human-directed learning for
unmanned systems.
IA’s primary payoff will be in allowing small numbers of forward-deployed users to
task large numbers of distributed, heterogeneous unmanned systems based on highlevel
mission tasking. This will support a wide range of users such as small ships,
maritime patrol aircraft, submarines, and Marine Corp/SOF small units. It will reduce
manning requirements and support the ability to share assets, collaborate, and get
unmanned system services to the tactical edge.