A Role-Based Approach to Unmanned Team Operations

Many military concepts for future employment of unmanned systems will require coordinated action by teams of unmanned vehicles and often manned/unmanned teams. The effectiveness of these heterogeneous military teams will rely on their ability to perform in dynamic, stressful situations as well as pure human teams do today. Current solutions for teaming of manned and unmanned assets rely on continuous communication for explicit coordination of team members. This strategy will quickly break down in realistic operations where unexpected events, mission changes and loss of communications frequently occur. To achieve more sophisticated teaming, new approaches and technologies are required to enable robotic entities to integrate into human teams. Lockheed Martin is developing a technology for Role-Based Operations (RBO) which allows teams of unmanned systems, or mixed teams of manned/unmanned systems, to operate via implicit coordination when continuously adaptive behavior is required of a team, and effective communication is not possible among team members. RBO applies the concept of team and mission roles by partitioning mission tasks and intra-team responsibilities into role themed collections allocated to team members. Each role defines appropriate reactions for a team member to tactical events and enables effective coordination of team actions in the absence of explicit communication. Finally, RBO allows for a natural integration of heterogeneous entities by using a teaming strategy already familiar to humans. In this paper, we describe the RBO concept in greater detail and briefly cover the RBO architecture before presenting the capabilities of our prototype implementation with our current demonstration. We will describe the extension of the RBO prototype to support predictive, role-based, implicit coordination. We also describe how this concept would be used in military operations, particularly in manned/unmanned operations, and conclude with discussion of further research directions for this work.