Integrated Simulation Environment for Unmanned Autonomous Systems—Towards a Conceptual Framework

Abstract

The paper initiates a comprehensive conceptual framework for an integrated simulation environment for unmanned autonomous systems (UAS) that is capable of supporting the design, analysis, testing, and evaluation from a "system of systems" perspective. The paper also investigates the current state of the art of modeling and performance assessment of UAS and their components and identifies directions for future developments. All the components of a comprehensive simulation environment focused on the testing and evaluation of UAS are identified and defined through detailed analysis of current and future required capabilities and performance. The generality and completeness of the simulation environment is ensured by including all operational domains, types of agents, external systems, missions, and interactions between components. The conceptual framework for the simulation environment is formulated with flexibility, modularity, generality, and portability as key objectives. The development of the conceptual framework for the UAS simulation reveals important aspects related to the mechanisms and interactions that determine specific UAS characteristics including complexity, adaptability, synergy, and high impact of artificial and human intelligence on system performance and effectiveness.

A Systems-Of-Systems Conceptual Model and Live Virtual Constructive Simulation Framework for Improved Nuclear Disaster Emergency Preparedness, Response, and Mitigation

“…Many of these works utilize simulation techniques, due in part to the complex nature of UAS and their environmental interactions and the difficulty in analytically evaluating real-world systems (Law and Kelton 2000). A generalized framework for simulation based analysis exists for UAS (Perhinschi et al 2010) and unmanned systems (Flint et al 2009;Liu et al 2014). Beyond those maintained by NRC and Sandia, M&S are available for both reactor thermohydraulics modeling (Wang et al 2005;Wang et al 2015b) and material dispersion modeling.…”

Platform simulation based Unmanned Aircraft Systems design

“…These vehicles are controlled or supervised by human operators through one or more ground stations [1]. [3]. In addition, UAS systems are subject to stringent safety (risk of crash) and embedded constraints (limited payload which implies power and computing resources limitation) [4].…”

“…These tools allow analyzing complex interactions among UAS "ontable". Current UAS simulation tools focus on limited or isolated development areas [3]. The effort is directed, in particular, toward UAS dynamic modeling and control [6][7][8] [9].…”

“…Reference [3] proposes a conceptualization of an integrated simulation platform for autonomous systems based on a perspective of "system of systems". However, the authors do not propose an implementation of this concept.…”

“…We endow the proposed platform with tools to support this development approach. Indeed, a network oriented architecture and object-oriented design [16] were adopted, which complies with the specifications established in [3]. This allows the platform to be modular, flexible and integrate many components of UAS simultaneously (scalability).…”