A Brief Introduction to Unmanned Systems Autonomy Services (UxAS)

Abstract

Future concepts for autonomy envisage teams of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) performing a variety of missions quickly, efficiently, and with minimal human oversight. However, developers of mission-level autonomy for UAV teams face many challenges. These include the need to support ad hoc inter-UAV communication, to provide a baseline set of autonomous capabilities, to support the ongoing incorporation of new autonomous capabilities, and to manage the inherent complexity of the software. To address these challenges, we developed the Unmanned Systems Autonomy Services (UxAS), an extensible software framework for mission-level autonomy for teams of unmanned systems, with a focus on UAVs. UxAS was borne out of over 15 years of research and 10 years of flight testing and is now publicly available and free to use.We start with a discussion of mission-level autonomy, followed by an overview of UxAS. Next, we provide a high-level comparison to other software frameworks and a more in-depth comparison to the Robot Operating System. Then, we provide details on UxAS services and configuration, discuss how a core set of services can be configured to work together to plan and execute a multi-UAV surveillance mission, describe utilization and flight testing of UxAS, and discuss areas of future work.