Design of a Decision Support Architecture for Human Operators in UAV Fleet C2 Applications∗

UAVs are becoming indispensable assets for military command and control applications such as surveillance, reconnaissance, search and rescue operations because of their superiorities over manned vehicles. Nevertheless, humans are still needed for high-level guidance and commanding of UAVs in those operations for their intelligence and higher level of flexibility in decision making. Within this new position, human operators are responsible for commanding of multiple UAVs under hard timing constraints in a dynamically changing environment. The supervisory control of the UAVs becomes more challenging as the number of the UAVs increases and it is sometimes intractable or infeasible even by a set of operators. In this work, we focus on development of decision support tools in order to improve of the agility of a C2 system for UAV fleets and present the framework of a real-time decision support system for operators who are responsible for high-level decision making in scenarios involving a large number of tasks across multiple UAVs. The decision support system consists of three stages including planning, scheduling and low-level mission specific task planning. The overall system is integrated to a labscale multi-vehicle mission simulator, demonstrating the ability of human operators for exploiting a fuller set of UAV fleet capabilities.