Decades of AI-expertise fuel growth of National Center for Collaborative Autonomy

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Recent military conflicts around the world have underscored the growing importance of autonomous systems, including drones, in modern warfare.

In the civilian world, the impact of autonomous systems is equally profound and is expected to grow dramatically. Collaborative autonomy will enable everything from self-driving vehicles to space exploration and much more.

Controlling and coordinating these interconnected human-machine systems, and maximizing their utility and efficacy in the air, on land, underwater, and even in space, will be critical to protecting the nation’s security and economic interests.

An award secured by the Florida Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (IHMC) has the Institute poised to continue to be a leader of this initiative, creating a center of research excellence in cooperative human-machine teaming, a research area focused on optimizing the ability of these systems to work together with humans.

The National Center for Collaborative Autonomy (NCCA) leverages and expands IHMC’s internationally recognized expertise in AI and autonomous systems, human-machine teaming, communications networking, collaborative federated multidomain autonomy in uncertain communication environments, human factors, and related disciplines. The story is highlighted in the most recent edition of the IHMC newsletter, available now.

This $6.7 million award from the Triumph Gulf Coast Board will establish and support multiple areas of research, add technology-centered jobs to the regional economy, and advance innovation in the Northwest Florida region.

Triumph is the nonprofit corporation funded by a legal settlement with BP following the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill. Its purpose is to seed projects that will transform the regional economy. The NCCA is poised to do just that, says Dr. Morley Stone, IHMC’s Chief Executive Officer.

“The National Center for Collaborative Autonomy could have a generational impact not only on the regional economy, but also on military response, disaster response, and much more,” Stone says. “Improving the way humans and machines learn and team together is one of our foundational pillars. No one knows more about this work than the IHMC team. This award will allow us to elevate the research that we do in order to get the maximum benefit for our national security and first responder communities.

“Triumph Gulf Coast is once again making a significant investment in IHMC and in the future of this region as a center of excellence in science and technology,” Stone says.

THE FUTURE OF WARFARE — AND MORE

Momentum for the Center comes at a time when it is increasingly clear that unmanned aerial vehicles are changing the future of warfighting dramatically. Dr. Niranjan Suri, IHMC’s Associate Director, says the war in Ukraine shows this starkly.

“The practice of warfare is fundamentally changed by what we see in Ukraine in the use of drones,” he says. “And we know that our adversaries know this as well. The only way to scale this up is to have autonomy, but autonomy of a single platform is not sufficient. We need all of these platforms to start collaborating with each other.”

Where in the past one unmanned aerial vehicle was controlled by one operator, future strategies will mean moving away from that 1-1 ratio toward systems that allow individual operators to manage multiple UAVs — and that will require even larger groups of UAVs to be able to communicate and collaborate among each other.

The NCCA’s work will also draw upon research into reasoning under uncertainty and teaming intelligence, both areas where IHMC has deep expertise. Dr. Matt Johnson has decades of experience in making human-machine teams more flexible, resilient and effective.

“The NCCA is partly focused on the scaling problem,” Johnson says. “In order to get more bang for your buck (these robotic systems) you need them to do things autonomously and to do that, they need to be able to see the world for themselves and be able to interpret what they’re seeing, and they need to be able to make their own decisions. All of that should be in the context of a human directed goal,” Johnson says. If you don’t, one-to-one control is going to be your limit and that’s just not very useful.”

While military application is a primary initial focus, other applications for robust collaborative autonomous systems include disaster relief and other civilian applications.

Suri says collaborative autonomy will enable a fleet of vehicles surveying from the air and land to assess damage to infrastructure, enhance situation awareness and support logistics for relief efforts after a natural disaster — in a fraction of the time it would take boots on the ground to accomplish the same thing.

“It will allow us to know what has happened, where is the highest-priority need, and what do we need to do. We feel that collaborative autonomy will play a major role in that kind of disaster response scenarios,” Suri says.

The region’s substantial military research presence will be an important contributor to the NCCA’s development and sustained success. Northwest Florida is home to the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory at Eglin Air Force Base, Special Operations Command at Hurlburt Field, and the Navy Surface Warfare Center in Panama City, among others.

The NCCA also enhances a unique academic training opportunity thanks to IHMC’s partnership with the University of West Florida in the joint Intelligent Systems and Robotics Ph.D. program.

The NCCA also will bring together national partners with interests related to collaborative autonomy to help accelerate progress in the domain.

Johnson says that IHMC will host workshops to bring the leading experts in the field together to brainstorm and provide a vision for the future of collaborative autonomy.

A major goal is to demonstrate the value of Collaborative Autonomy and to foster future government programs that enhance U.S. capabilities with the NCCA partners leading the way, Johnson says.

“We are bringing together, of course, our expertise in robotics, AI, human-machine teaming and other traditional IHMC research areas,” Suri says. “This is, at its heart, a big part of what IHMC does. A new challenge comes up. We find what expertise we can draw on to help address the challenge. We assemble the team, and we go.”