Multi-Entity Teaming—Role Based Operations Architecture

Overview

Teams of unmanned vehicles and people working together is no longer "future science." Lockheed Martin Advanced Technology Laboratories' (ATL) Role-Based Operations Architecture (RBOA) enables synthetic entities—unmanned vehicles (UVs) and software agents—to function as "teammates" with humans. The ability to treat UVs and agents as teammates, rather than as devices that require constant control, enables the warfighter of the future to effectively exploit the increasingly sophisticated capabilities and growing numbers of synthetic entities that will be a feature of future operations.

Evolving concept of operations are extending the control of synthetic entities to ever-lower levels of command, while the sophistication and numbers of such entities increases. Enabling synthetic entities to work with humans as teammates reduces warfighter overload, making synthetic entities a true force multiplier, and capitalizes on the human ability to team.

Over the past three years, ATL has designed and implemented a software architecture and a set of reusable functions that extends the control architecture of a UV or software agent to enable the entity to use capabilities, team structure, etc. when deciding what actions to take. Using iRobot research robots and ATL's EMAA intelligent agent system platform, we created a teaming test bed that allows us to experiment with multi-entity teams composed of humans, UVs, and agents in the execution of operationally derived challenge problems.

Innovative Approach

Research has shown that humans use roles to aid them in teaming. Roles capture information regarding team structure, skills, responsibilities, team coordination, and dependencies. RBOA, which has reusable templates, functional components, and uses a teaming markup language to capture team and mission information, enables synthetic entities to play roles within a team and recognize roles of other team members when deciding on actions. Incorporating roles into a multi-UV architecture will simplify and enable mission replanning based on recognized roles already assigned to each available UV.

Applications

RBOA's technology can be transitioned to many programs of interest to Lockheed Martin including DARPA's

Joint Unmanned Combat Air Systems as well as other aerial, ground, and underwater UVs. ATL has been funded for a proof-of-concept project on adaptive robotic control through DARPA IPTO that will leverage components of our RBOA research.