Battlespace

The military has a clear picture of the force it would like to field in the coming decades and this image has a single prevailing theme: the integration of manned and unmanned units. The addition of unmanned units will decrease the danger soldiers face in direct combat, and the DoD (Department of Defense) roadmap calls for an immediate and sustained increase in the use of unmanned units, starting with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) (2002). By 2012, the DoD roadmap projects that F-16-sized UAVs will perform a complete range of combat and combat support missions, including Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses (SEAD), Electronic Attack (EA), and even deep strike interdiction. UAVs specialize in missions commonly categorized as “the dull, the dirty, and the dangerous.”

Furthermore, the DoD roadmap requires that a single operator be able to control a UAV swarm. However, for this goal to be realistic, one of two research paths must be chosen and followed. Either the UAVs in the swarm will be totally autonomous and therefore require no human supervision, or the human interface to the swarm will need to be radically different from current UAV interfaces, which require multiple pilots for a single UAV. This paper makes the case for the second path and then elaborates on how to improve upon the current state of the art. The paper introduces two major research challenges: one a more efficient way to control the UAVs, and the other a superior way to monitor and manage a swarm’s progress and minimize the number of operators needed. It then presents methods for attacking each challenge, the results currently obtained, and a discussion of the future research direction.