A Goal Reasoning Agent for Controlling UAVs in Beyond-Visual-Range Air Combat

A Goal Reasoning Agent for Controlling UAVs in Beyond-Visual-Range Air Combat

Michael W. Floyd, Justin Karneeb, Philip Moore, David W. Aha

Proceedings of the Twenty-Sixth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
AI and autonomy track. Pages 4714-4721. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2017/657

We describe the Tactical Battle Manager (TBM), an intelligent agent that uses several integrated artificial intelligence techniques to control an autonomous unmanned aerial vehicle in simulated beyond-visual-range (BVR) air combat scenarios. The TBM incorporates goal reasoning, automated planning, opponent behavior recognition, state prediction, and discrepancy detection to operate in a real-time, dynamic, uncertain, and adversarial environment. We describe evidence from our empirical study that the TBM significantly outperforms an expert-scripted agent in BVR scenarios. We also report the results of an ablation study which indicates that all components of our agent architecture are needed to maximize mission performance.
Keywords:
Technical: Techniques
Technical: Models