Date of Award
12-24-2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Science in Systems Engineering
Department
Department of Systems Engineering and Management
First Advisor
David R. Jacques, PhD.
Abstract
Small unmanned systems provide great utility to military applications due to their portable and expendable design. These systems are, however, costly to develop, produce, and maintain, making it desirable to integrate available commercial off the shelf (COTS) components. This research investigates the integration of COTS components through the development of a modular unified command and control (C2) architecture for heterogeneous and homogeneous vehicle teams to accomplish formation flocking and communication relay scenarios. A vehicle agnostic architecture was developed to be applied across different vehicle platforms, different vehicle combination, and different cooperative missions. COTS components consisting primarily of open source hardware and software were integrated and tested based on the positional accuracy, precision, and other qualitative measures. The resulting system successfully demonstrated formation flocking in three of four vehicle combinations, with the forth still demonstrating leader follower behaviors. The system achieved at best a mean positional error of 0.99m, a standard deviation of 0.44m, and a DRMS of 0.59m. The communication relay scenario was also demonstrated with two vehicle combinations for both distance and physical obstructions breaking the C2 link. This system demonstrated the desired capabilities and could easily be adapted to accomplish others through the use of the flexible architecture.
AFIT Designator
AFIT-ENV-MS-15-D-048
DTIC Accession Number
AD1003560
Recommended Citation
Gray, Jeremy, "Design and Implementation of a Unified Command and Control Architecture for Multiple Cooperative Unmanned Vehicles Utilizing Commercial Off the Shelf Components" (2015). Theses and Dissertations. 235.
https://scholar.afit.edu/etd/235