Multi-Agent Teaming and Coordination for Congested Aerospace Environment

As congestion increases in both the airspace and orbital domains, there is a need for advanced command and control systems that facilitate coordination between teams containing human and autonomous agents. These systems need to function effectively in dynamic and uncertain environments, with time delays, communication constraints, and potentially noncooperative or competing entities in the environment. Solutions that address these challenges will be vital to applications of interest to the Department of the Air Force, such as search-and-rescue using swarms of drones or ground-/space-based systems for space domain awareness. These applications underscore the need to refine current technologies for the safe coexistence and maneuvering of human-operated, semi-autonomous, and fully autonomous agents. Key directions of research include the development of approaches for interpretable and efficient long-horizon task planning for complex multi-agent missions, enhancing existing navigation and collision avoidance capabilities to optimize team-level objectives, and understanding the tradeoffs between decentralization, scalability, robustness, operational efficiency and information-sharing in these systems. The project seeks to devise operationally-relevant strategies that optimize and enhance these capabilities, thereby enhancing the safety and efficacy of operations within increasingly congested airspace and orbital environments.

Published Research

To learn more about Guardian Autonomy research and other AI Accelerator projects, view our published research here.

Are you up for a Challenge?

Learn more about AI Accelerator challenges here.