Research Topics

As autonomous vehicles proliferate, mission designs naturally move towards multiple autonomous agents working in cooperation to solve problems. We seek frameworks applied to multiple agents that don’t just enhance single vehicle capabilities but instead enable new mission designs and revolutionary advances in autonomous team achievements.

In large and complex engagements, many open questions remain when incorporating autonomous agents with operators, decision makers, and planners. Some questions we are seeking insight into are:

• What level of centralization vs. decentralization in command and control is optimal in an engagement? How does this change as the environment, enemy, and resources evolve?
• What level of autonomy should be given to agents in a large operation? How does this change as the environment, enemy, and resources evolve?
• What is the optimal teaming formulation (crewed, uncrewed, crewed-uncrewed) to complete an objective? How does this change as the environment, enemy, and resources evolve? How is the trade-off between successfully completing this mission vs. reserving resources for future engagements made?

There has been a push by governments and the space-industry to increase the amount of verifiable autonomy used in orbit operations and extra-terrestrial exploration. We seek advancements in spacecraft autonomy that can apply to Earth orbit, the Moon, and beyond.

Robust navigation is an underpinning to higher level autonomy functions. We seek vehicle navigation and perception technologies that operate robustly both with and without GPS across domains from underwater to beyond Earth orbit.

We seek planning and decision making frameworks that have an awareness of system uncertainty and can present operators with optimal plans including knowledge of uncertainty before and after planned actions. We would be targeting PhD students for the development of novel approaches, and MS students for the application of existing approaches to specific problems of interest to Draper.

Although Draper has been successful in fielding autonomous systems across domains, we are constantly seeking for ways to decrease the development and fielding times while increasing our robustification, continuous testing, and V&V capabilities. To meet the increasing performance guarantees required by these advanced autonomous systems and our customers, we are seeking PhD and MS level research in simulation, V&V, automated field testing, and enabling advanced autonomy architectures.

Even though there have been significant advances in AI-based autonomy over the past decade, there are still areas that warrant additional research to increase the field-worthiness of these proposed approaches. Specifically, we seek AI research in the sub-fields of mission planning, explain-ability and robustness measures, AI-based planning and battlefield estimation heuristics, GN&C, and swarm tactics.