Tactical information operations for autonomous teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)

This paper presents a study of tactical information operations in autonomous teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). We discuss the special challenges presented by the autonomous UAV team model, and we present the self-sustaining, self-configuring dynamic network architecture we have developed to address these challenges. We further discuss actual fielded experiments in which elements of the architecture have been proven through realistic test scenarios using surrogate unmanned aerial and ground vehicles. We conclude the paper by presenting lessons learned through the fielded experiments, performance analysis results and plans for future work.