SBIR/STTR Award attributes
This proposal is for a Team Oriented Resource Management and Control (TORMAC) solution to the problem of distributed decision-making for resource constrained platforms in complex environments. As autonomous unmanned vehicles (UXV), sensor and manned vehicle capabilities have proliferated, it is more important to find ways of coordinating these assets towards common objectives in an evolving, communications degraded and potentially hostile environment. There is a clear need to be able to coordinate assets across domains, space, time and circumstances to meet common, joint and multiple objectives. The capability must be functional despite factors such as changing environmental conditions, tight and changing resource constraints, and actions with uncertain outcomes. A framework for distributed decision-making towards cooperative goals will have broad applicability to both civilian and military applications including in environmental, construction, health, and disaster response scenarios. The TORMAC approach features two key conceptual ideas: Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs) and Teamwork as formalized by our partners. POMDPs are a formalism and related algorithms for reasoning about courses of action under uncertain action and uncertain knowledge of an environment. Together, the planning provided by the POMDPs and the teamwork to react in a principled way to changing circumstances and will form the basis of the TORMAC framework.
