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JANUARY 2, 07:03 EDT
PITTSBURGH -- Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University of Pittsburgh are looking into new ways to control manned and unmanned aircraft under terms of a $2.5 million contract awarded Dec. 7.
The four-year, "Mixed Initiative Probabilistic Control of Teams of Unmanned Vehicles in Adversarial Environments," came from the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) Information Directorate in Rome, N.Y.
"The Carnegie-Mellon effort will focus on technology that allows
commanders to control their assets when they do not know everything about
the battlefield," says Carl DeFranco Jr., program manager in AFRL's Information Systems Division.
The project, which comes under supervision of the U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) in Arlington, Va., is part of DARPA's Mixed Initiative Control of Automa-teams (MICA) program.
"Carnegie-Mellon researchers will be looking at methods for controlling manned and unmanned air vehicles in a hostile environment using partially observable Markov decision processes," DeFranco says. "The Markov process uses probabilities to compute future actions."
The MICA program will develop the theory, algorithms, software, modeling and simulation technologies to coordinate multi-level planning, assessment and control of distributed semi-autonomous forces with collective objectives through the hierarchical application of systems and control theoretic methods, Air Force officials say.
Military & Aerospace Electronics
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