Many missions require teams of vehicles to cooperate in order to achieve various tasks or goals. Often, these vehicles have varying capabilities or technologies onboard. Their respective strengths and weaknesses must be taken into account in response to changing conditions during the execution of a mission. This is especially true when the mission involves adversarial vehicles and/or other threats. Methodologies for holistically analyzing the coupled effects of vehicle/agent control strategies, staging, and team composition are the focus of this research topic. In some cases, there may be opportunities in the pre-mission planning phase to decide where to place or initialize (i.e., stage) assets and/or vehicles as well as define a particular team composition (i.e., numbers of each type of asset or vehicle). The utility or cost of these pre-mission decisions is coupled with the utility/cost of the dynamic decisions being made by the vehicles during mission execution. When the adversary is also making pre-mission decisions, there arises a multi-stage game wherein the first stage may be a game over staging and composition and the second stage is a differential game played out by the vehicles.
In addition, novel scenario and differential game formulations that are representative of modern mission sets are sought. Based on these formulations, control strategies which have robustness guarantees with respect to adversarial actions, information asymmetry, deception, and external disturbances should be obtained.
References:
Von Moll, Alexander. "Skirmish-Level Tactics via Game-Theoretic Analysis." Ph.D. Dissertation. University of Cincinnati. 2022.
Shishika, Daigo et al. "Team Composition for Perimeter Defense with Patrollers and Defenders." Conference on Decision and Control. IEEE. 2019.
Manyam, Satyanarayana G., David Casbeer, Alexander Von Moll, and Eloy Garcia. "Coordinating Defender Path Planning for Optimal Target-Attacker-Defender Game." SciTech. AIAA. 2019.
Keywords:
game, differential game, tactics, decision making, teaming, hierarchical control
Eligibility:
Open to U.S. Citizens only
AFRL-2024-3098
