DCF® a JAUS and TENA compliant agent-based framework for UAS performance evaluation

Real-world applications for UAS teams continue to grow, and the scale and complexity of the teams is continually increasing. To reduce life cycle costs and improve T&E, there is increasing need for a generalized framework that can support the design and development of T&E approaches for multi-UAS teams and validate the feasibility of the concepts, architectures and algorithms. This challenge is most significant in the cognitive/social domains, where the development of test approaches and methodologies are difficult because of the emergent nature of behaviors in response to dynamic changes in the battlespace. Current DOD T&E capabilities and methodologies are insufficient to address these needs. Today much of the initial validation effort is done using simulations, which unfortunately very rarely capture the complexity of this problem. Current simulations rarely capture the complexity of real world effects related to net-centric communications, vehicle dynamics, distributed sensors, the physical environment (terrain), external disturbances, etc. Furthermore, very often high fidelity simulations do not scale as the number of UAS increases. On the other extreme, directly implementing hardware platforms without high resolution simulations to help refine the design induces significant risk. For large unmanned system teams, shortcomings in design decisions related to the control architecture, information flow, sensor fusion, assumptions on communication bandwidths, and robustness of the algorithms may only become apparent when deployment on several hardware platforms has been completed, resulting in a significant loss of time and resources. In response to this need, under a recently completed effort with TRMC, IAI has developed the Distributed Control Framework (DCF), an Integrated Agent-based T&E Framework for Simulated, Mixed-Model (Virtual and Live/hardware in the loop) and Live Testing of Teams of Unmanned Autonomous Systems. In recent efforts, DCF has been made JAUS compliant, and integration with TENA has been achieved. In this paper we discuss the development of this framework, details of JAUS compliance implementation and initial results of its deployment at ARDEC in Picatinny Arsenal on use cases involving teams of FireAnt Robots performing cooperative surveillance tasks.