Multi-unmanned vehicle systems (nUxVs) at Defence R&D Canada

No single UxV is perfectly suited to all task assignments. A homogeneous UxV team, for example, a troop of identical UGVs, brings redundancy and reliability to a specific class of tasks. Heterogeneous UxV teams, for example, a troop of UGVs, a flight of low flying rotorcraft, and a high flying UAV, provide increased capability. They can tackle multiple tasks simultaneously through cooperative decision making, distributed task allocation, and collective mapping. Together, they can convoy payloads, provide communications, observe targets, shield troops, and, ultimately, deliver munitions. nUxVs have the potential to share, learn, and adapt information between like platforms and across platform types, to produce expanded capability and greater reliability. Current research exploits simple vehicle state exchange, communications relay and formation keeping. Our near-term research areas include map sharing and integration, task coordination, and heterogeneous nUxV teaming. Future research will address military nUxV C2; nUxV capability definition and understanding; behaviour-based and reactive nUxVs, emergence and stigmergy; and collaboration and interaction between human-robot teams.