A Technical Roadmap for Autonomy for Marine Future Vertical Lift (FVL)

NPS NRP Executive Summary ; The United States Marine Corps (USMC) is investing in aviation technologies through its Vertical Takeoff and Landing (VTOL) aircraft program that will enhance mission superiority and warfare dominance. One USMC program initiative is to launch unmanned aerial systems (UAS) from future human-piloted VTOL aircraft for collaborative hybrid (manned and unmanned) missions. This hybrid VTOL-UAS capability will support USMC intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), electronic warfare (EW), communications relay, and kinetic strike air-to-ground missions. This capstone project studied the complex human-machine interactions involved in the future hybrid VTOL-UAS capability through model-based systems engineering analysis, coactive design interdependence analysis, and modeling and simulation experimentation. The capstone focused on a strike coordination and reconnaissance (SCAR) mission involving a manned VTOL platform, a VTOL-launched UAS, and a ground control station (GCS). The project produced system requirements and architecture, a conceptual design, and experimental insights into the humanmachine teaming aspects of future VTOL capability. Key findings were that the UAS possesses a high level of digital automation organically and shared with its human partners, which also implies that the humans’ planning and execution must be digitally captured. This ensures that the partners will observe, predict, and direct one another, building trust. The second finding was that the entire team requires a secure and redundant primary, alternate, contingency, and emergency (PACE) communications plan to support resilient mission planning, execution, and post-mission analysis. Lastly, the research demonstrated the efficacy of using networked simulators to explore, assess, and measure human machine teaming effectiveness. The research recommends that the USMC adopt a strategy to procure high-level autonomous UAS, capable of natural language processing, mission assessment, and policy update ...