The Migration of a Collaborative UAV Testbed into the Flames Simulation Environment

Future generations of unmanned air vehicles (UAVs) will posses the ability to autonomously cooperate in teams to meet various military objectives. This is the focus of research at the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory, which developed MultiUAV, a research tool used to simulate UAV teams collaborating autonomously in various mission scenarios. In a previous effort, Suppression of Enemy Air Defense (SEAD) mission capabilities were developed for multiUAV and tested against joint integrated mission model (JIMM) scenarios. This architecture provided an accurate battlefield environment for small SEAD studies. To truly stress the collaborative algorithms in multiUAV and build complex SEAD missions, a connection to a streamlined and user-friendly software tool was required. The flexible analysis modeling and exercise system (FLAMES) software has been chosen as the JIMM replacement. This paper describes the MultiUAV/FLAMES integration effort and provides results to illustrate MultiUAV conducting complex SEAD missions using battlefield information provided by FLAMES