Abstract
Unmanned systems are gradually becoming more autonomous, meaning they can perform more tasks with less micromanagement. These systems will have increasing importance in military operations over the next years. For communication with these systems, a language that is unambiguous and machine interpretable is needed. Battle management language (BML) refers to such a language, which can be used to exchange digitized forms of orders, reports and requests. BML has mainly been developed to support inter-operation among command and control (C2) systems and C2 and simulation systems, but BML has also been used for robotic systems. The only standardized BML so far is coalition battle management language (C-BML), which specifically addresses the needs associated with coalition operation.
In this paper we describe our effort in applying BML to an unmanned surface vehicle and an unmanned ground vehicle. The unmanned systems are able to autonomously perform tasks like move from A to B, move along a route, patrol, and survey an area. However, transition from teleoperated systems to more autonomous systems is progressing gradually, meaning we still want at least the possibility to provide relatively detailed instructions to the robotic system. In addition, the ability to make small adjustments of the behavior is sometimes useful. We find that there is a gap between the standards for teleoperation and BML in its current form and would like a discussion on how to best fill this gap. Our preliminary solutions are presented in this paper.
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Notes
- 1.
OLAV = Off-road Light Autonomous Vehicle.
- 2.
Note that we did not consider the C-BML full scheme.
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Seehuus, R.A., Mathiassen, K., Ruud, EL.M., Skjerlie Simonsen, A., Hermansen, F. (2019). Battle Management Language for Robotic Systems. In: Mazal, J. (eds) Modelling and Simulation for Autonomous Systems. MESAS 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11472. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14984-0_23
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