Multi-Agent Architecture for Future European Military Vehicles

Description

Hosted by the ISL Institut franco-allemand de recherches de Saint-Louis (ISL), the conference opened with keynotes by Jean-François Ripoche, EDA Director for Research and Technology, and Colonel Oleksiy Nozdrachov of the Ukrainian Armed Forces, addressing the battlefield of tomorrow

Description complémentaire

As unmanned systems are increasingly being deployed in real-world use case scenarios, there are also more and more situations where the deployment of multi-agent robotic systems provides significant added value. However, deploying multi-robot systems requires careful consideration of the system architecture to enable seamless collaboration between all actors. This work tackles the architecture definition of the future military unmanned ground systems to perform troop support during military operations. Thus, overcoming various limitations that unmanned systems face off on such situation must be taken into account.
Indeed, autonomous systems aim to interact with their environment through navigation or manipulations. Consequently, they require abilities to comprehend and act on their surroundings. As a result, military environments infer significant challenges to overcome in such autonomous operations.
One of the main challenges to handle comes from the natural aspects of the operational areas. These systems must operate in various environment such as desert, snow field, forest, etc. Moreover, they must get the ability to perceive and comprehend their surroundings independently to the weather condition such as snow, sun, rain, fog, etc. Hence, they require sensors and their related processing, providing the perception of diverse unstructured objects and predicting their eventual dynamics to interpret the possible actions they can make.
On the other hand, the military environment alludes to evolving in an adversary area, where some unpredictable events can occur. These events can be of multiple natures, such as sudden changes in the surroundings, losing a vehicle team member, or disrupting communication channels that require fast adaptation abilities. It is also possible to prevent and react to some events by acknowledging the situational awareness gathered by different assets on the field and enhancing the knowledge of others.
Moreover, unmanned systems require active collaborations, either with humans sharing the same workspace or operators gathering field information and providing the missions to execute. Thus, autonomous systems must ensure the safety of the surrounding humans allowing them to avoid humans being judged too close or giving the possibility to re-take control at any time. Moreover, the operator must be able to command and get feedback from the system in a straightforward fashion, avoiding an overload of his cognitive load and allowing him to control multiple assets.
The architecture of the future European military ground systems needs to comply to all of those constraints to be effective on supporting troops on the field. In this work, we consider different military use cases and present the multi-robot system architecture developed within the EDIDP iMUGS project, which intends to develop a modular, interoperable, and cybersecure architecture for future manned-unmanned military systems.

Période	5 févr. 2024 → 6 févr. 2024
Titre de l'événement	EDA Swarming Technologies Conference
Type d'événement	Séminaire
Emplacement	Saint-Louis, FranceAfficher sur la carte
Degré de reconnaissance	International