SBIR-STTR Award

In the increasingly automated modern battlespace, missions will be carried out by heterogeneous packages of manned and unmanned platforms.One complicating factor will be the mobility of the operators controlling these packages.Mission success depends on operators planning and controlling these assets from the field, where communication infrastructure may be extremely limited.This will require a portable Operational Control Unit that gives operators the situational awareness to monitor the progress of the assets with limited bandwidth.Our long term goal is to build a fully automated mission planning system with the following characteristics:easy integration of new asset platforms; optimal matching of assets to mission; efficient route planning; support for a highly mobile, remote operator; an advanced, intuitive user interface; and a mechanism for continuous improvement of mission templates.The key innovations we propose to support these goals are expansion of our existing NettWarrior app to control multiple robots, development of wizards to assist operators in creating mission templates, incorporation of advanced Human-Computer interface devices to increase situational awareness and a system architecture that supports collaborative, distributed planning among multiple team members.Additionally, we plan to include a plug & play capability to control robots with differing capabilities.

Design and develop a handheld robotics and armament controller component that can receive information from multiple manned and unmanned platforms/sensors, develop multi-platform coordinated mission plans, develop real-time dynamic platform plan/updates for each of the platforms utilizing a single integrated OCU to coordinate multiple platforms. Our OCU component will take advantage of state-of-the-art technologies in the areas of: swarming algorithms, 3D visualization, teaming, standardized message formats, collaborative multi-platform planning, mapping, route planning, augmented reality, mission execution, and multi-sensor integration.