The Linnaeus Centre for Control, Autonomy, and Decision-making in Complex Systems (CADICS) at Linköping University is undertaking a research project on Collaborative Unmanned Aircraft Systems. The centre is funded by the Swedish Research Council.
Collaborative Unmanned Aircraft Systems
The practical use and acceptance of unmanned aircraft systems (UASs) is dependent on a verifiable, principled and well-defined foundation for interactions between human operators and autonomous systems. This interaction is going to be mixed-initiative in nature. Humans will request help from autonomous systems and autonomous systems will request help from humans when collaborating to achieve complex missions in unstructured and challenging environments. In developing a principled framework for such sophisticated interactions, a great many interdependent conceptual and pragmatic issues arise and need clarification both theoretically and pragmatically in the form of demonstrators.
In this project we are targeting a triad of fundamental, interdependent conceptual issues: delegation, mixed-initiative interaction and adjustable autonomy. These are used as a basis for developing a principled framework for collaborative unmanned aircraft systems. These concepts can be used to clarify, validate and verify different types of interaction between UASs and human operators.
The complexity of developing deployed architectures for realistic collaborative activities among robots that operate in the real world under time and space constraints is very high. This complexity will be tackled by working both abstractly at a formal logical level and concretely at a system building level. More importantly, the two approaches will be related to each other by grounding the formal abstractions into actual software implementations. This guarantees the fidelity of the actual system to the formal specification.