The goal of this TIF project is to warrant increased reliability and survivability of networked teaming air vehicles by developing innovative architectures and algorithms enabling multivehicle systems to carry out autonomous diagnosis, prognosis and health management online and self-adaptation to dynamic events with minimum involvement of operating crew.

It is envisaged that future unmanned and joint manned-unmanned missions will include cooperative moving target engagements, search, surveillance, and multi-formation flights, to name a few. In such occasions, vehicles will exchange information through the network, and cooperate to achieve a common goal. However, despite each air vehicle being equipped with Fault Detection, Isolation/Identification and Reconfiguration (FDIR) software, to increase one's own reliability, overall mission performance may still be degraded when the level of severity of the faults is sufficiently high.

It is therefore proposed to develop a cooperative health management (CHM) architecture and algorithms, integrated with FDIR, enabling a distributed detection of neighboring Unmanned Airborne Vehicle anomalous conditions despite information flow faults, inherent to ad-hoc networks and complex dynamic environments.

The Mobile ad hoc and Sensor Network Systems group will participate in the following areas:

• Study of distributed mobile ad hoc network models and their impact on control system with different network induced priority level information and drop out policies when intermittent network faults occur.
• Adaptation of the Mobile Ad hoc Emulation Tool to reflect vehicle dynamics and disturbance effects.
• Use of the Mobile Ad hoc Emulation Tool for proof of concepts in an aerodynamic MANET environment.