Effects of Safety Protocols on Unmanned Vehicle Ground Operations
Authored by Jason C Ryan, M L Cummings
Date Published: 2015
DOI: 10.2514/1.i010293
Sponsors:
United States Office of Naval Research (ONR)
Platforms:
No platforms listed
Model Documentation:
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Abstract
Recent advances in unmanned and autonomous vehicle technology are
accelerating the push to integrate these vehicles into human-centered
environments such as commercial aviation and public roads. Much of the
current research into autonomous systems examines improving the
performance of individual unmanned vehicles or improving the safety of
their interactions with individual humans; very little examines the
behavior of the broader system. For large-scale transportation systems, real-world field trials involving unmanned vehicles are difficult to
execute due to concerns of cost, feasibility of construction, and the
maturity of the technologies. This paper describes the use of an
agent-based model of unmanned vehicle behavior in human-centered
environments to explore the effects of their implementation in these
domains. In particular, this work explores how safety protocols
governing the integration of manned and unmanned vehicles affect
performance in an aircraft carrier ground control environment. Three
different types of futuristic unmanned vehicle control architectures are
considered in conjunction with four different types of safety protocols:
dynamic, area, temporal, and combined area-plus-temporal separation.
Results demonstrate that measures of safety vary widely across these
systems, demonstrating distinct tradeoffs of safety and mission
performance, as well as across different safety measures.
Tags
Capacity
Supervisory control