Planning for Mission Efficiency, Robustness, and Resilience for Unmanned Autonomous Systems (UASs) in Contested Environments

Abstract

Unmanned Autonomous Systems (UASs) can remotely sense targets across large-scale areas but may be vulnerable to threats in contested environments. Current approaches consider efficiency through UAS path planning, but missions prioritizing robustness (i.e., the capacity to withstand disruptions) and resilience (i.e., the ability to recover from disruptions) are rarely considered despite their ability to increase mission success. This paper presents robust and resilient strategies for route planning for a fleet of UASs in a heterogeneous threat landscape. By integrating components of robustness and resilience in route planning through allowing the UASs to overlap in the waypoint locations and dynamic mission adaptation, the probability of mission success of complete area coverage can be increased. The results show that a robustness-focused strategy shows significant improvement in probability of mission success over an efficiency-based strategy, and that a resilience-based strategy outperforms both the efficiency- and robustness- based strategies. The specified methodologies provide promising future directions of research to explicitly incorporate robustness and resilience into UAS mission planning.