A Task-Centric Messaging Model for Federated Autonomous Collaboration

In response to a charge to address “Autonomy in Limited-Communication Environments,” the NATO SCI-288 Research Task Group determined that the aspect of this topic most relevant to a NATO context is communications for multivehicle operations between assets from different nations using different autonomy mission software. In order to facilitate such operations, the task group developed a conceptual shared message set for mission management, allowing tasks to be shared among autonomous assets and teams of autonomous assets by integration with this message set rather than requiring separate integrations between individual software solutions. Following the design efforts of the task group as a whole, four members of the group were able to secure resources for a synthetic demonstration and separately refined the message set and created a reference implementation. This implementation team integrated four different autonomy software solutions with the reference implementation and in October 2019 demonstrated successful joint execution of a synthetic mine countermeasures mission using the message set.