A Framework for Integrating the Development of Swarm Unmanned Aerial System Doctrine and Design

Unmanned Aerial System doctrine has been lacking, latent, or ignored as a prescribing design element in the emerging field of swarm technology. In this paper, an integrated methodology for designing a swarm unmanned aerial system (UAS) in parallel with swarm UAS mission doctrine is discussed. The structure of this methodology is derived from heuristics from the model-based systems engineering, robotics, human systems integration, biology, and computer science disciplines. The methodology provides a standard approach for designing and operating swarm UAS that seeks to meet the performance and doctrine requirements for any intended mission. 1.0 INTRODUCTION There has been an increased interest in swarm technology over the last two decades. Much of this can be attributed to the dynamic field of unmanned systems technology, which has been rapidly developing in both the government and private sector. Unmanned system technology has expanded from physically hazardous, highaltitude, extended-endurance military missions to agriculture, mining, search and rescue, and environmental research civilian and commercial missions (USDOD 2013). Unmanned systems provide many advantages over manned systems. In the case of UAS, they are less constrained by human factors such as crew rest, G-tolerance, environmental conditions, and comfort. Unmanned systems can be expendable and could have lower life-cycle costs than manned systems; however, low system reliability (Finn 2010), low technology readiness levels, large logistical footprints, and an ironic increased manpower requirement have marginalized cost advantages. Likewise, unmanned systems’ test and evaluation struggles, and poor track record for meeting operational effectiveness and suitability requirements have historically also contributed to higher system lifecycle costs. To produce mission-effective systems, system architects must consider the doctrine, design, and planned assessment methodologies when developing a swarm UAS. Swarm technology is evolving faster than the techniques and test scenarios used to assess them. There will be an increased dependency on modeling and simulation for testing these systems that was not as critically vital in manned aircraft or single UAV system testing. Previously used rapid fielding strategies for remotely piloted UAS incur too much risk for swarm UAS, which may, by design, exhibit stochastic emergent behavior. The applications of swarm technology to unmanned systems are in the infancy of realization, although clear benefits from the enhanced capabilities can be envisioned for military missions: persistent search, long-term monitoring, sensor data collection, distributed STO-MP-SET-222 14 1 PUBLIC RELEASE PUBLIC RELEASE A Framework for Integrating the Development of Swarm Unmanned Aerial System Doctrine and Design networks, object retrieval, and offensive attack missions. How these swarmed unmanned systems will be integrated with singular unmanned systems and manned systems, and for which missions they are best suited is not well established. The revolutionary impact to future military capabilities maybe beyond imagination at this point, but not beyond the technological horizon enabling them.