Multi-UAV autonomous collaborative Behaviors for convoy protection

Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) are expected to dramatically alter the way future battles are fought. Autonomous collaborative operation of teams of UAVs is a key enabler for efficient and effective deployment of large numbers of UAVs under the U. S. Army's vision for Force Transformation. Autonomous Collaborative Mission Systems (ACMS) is an extensible architecture and collaborative behavior planning approach to achieve multi-UAV autonomous collaborative capability. Under this architecture, a rich set of autonomous collaborative behaviors can be developed to accomplish a wide range of missions. In this article, we present our simulation results in applying various autonomous collaborative behaviors developed in the ACMS to an integrated convoy protection scenario using a heterogeneous team of UAVs.