M&S Based Testbed to Support V&V of Autonomous Resources Task Coordinator

Political instability around the world continues to place a significant emphasis on border control. Monitoring these borders requires persistent surveillance in a variety of remote, hazardous and hostile environments. While recent developments in autonomous and unmanned systems promise to provide a new generation of tools to assist in border control missions, the complexity of designing, testing and operating large-scale systems limits their adoption. A seam of research is developing around the use of Modelling and Simulation (M&S) methodologies to support the development, testing and operation of complex, multi-domain autonomous systems deployments. This paper builds upon recent progress in the use of M&S to conduct Verification and Validation (V&V) of complex software functionalities. Specifically, the authors have designed and developed an HLA (High Level Architecture) interoperable M&S testbed capability applied in support of the European Union's ROBORDER H2020 project. V&V has been completed on the Autonomous Resources Task Coordinator (ARTC) software, a module that will be employed in live demonstrations to automatically design missions for heterogeneous autonomous assets. The development and the employment of the interoperable simulation capability is discussed in a scenario designed to test the ARTC. The scenario involves aerial (fixed wing and rotary wing) and underwater assets mounting Electro-Optical/Infra-Red (EO/IR) cameras and pollution detection sensors. Asset and sensor performance is affected by realistic environmental conditions. The M&S-based test-bed capability has shown the correct operation of the ARTC, efficiently communicating the key findings to a range of stakeholder groups. The work has resulted in the creation and testing of an interoperable, modular, reusable testbed capability that will be reused to further support the wide-spread adoption of autonomous and unmanned systems in a range of operations.