Design and Simulation of a Wide Area Search Mission: An Implementation of an Autonomous Systems Reference Architecture

The implementation and testing of autonomous and cooperative unmanned systems is challenging due to the inherent design complexity, infinite test spaces, and lack of autonomy specific measures. Simulation provides a low cost alternative to flight tests, allowing researchers to rapidly iterate on the design before fielding. To expedite this process, an Autonomous System Reference Architecture allows researchers to utilize existing software modules to rapidly develop algorithms for autonomous systems and test them in included simulation environments. In this paper, we implement ASRA on a cooperative wide area search scenario as a test bed to study ASRA’s utility for rapid prototyping and evaluation of autonomous and cooperative systems. Through a face centered cubic design of experiments, selected autonomy metrics are studied to provide a response surface model to characterize the system and provide a tool to optimize mission control parameters and maximize mission performance.