Dynamic Route Replanning and Retasking of Unmanned Aerial Reconnaissance Vehicles

Today's high altitude endurance (HAE) reconnaissance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are extremely complex and capable systems. They are only as good as the quality of their implementation, however. Mission planning is rapidly increasing in complexity to accommodate the requirements of increasing aircraft and information control capabilities. Effective mission planning is the key to effective use of our airborne reconnaissance assets. Global Hawk, the current state-of-the-art in HAE unmanned reconnaissance aircraft systems, demands extremely intensive and detailed mission planning. The mission plan must accommodate a range of possible emergencies and other unplanned in-flight events, like pop-up threats or a critical aircraft system failure. Current in-flight mission replanning systems do not have sufficient capability for operators to effectively handle the full range of surprises commonly encountered in flight operations. Automation is commonly employed to reduce this high workload on human operators. This research proposes that a variety of common operational situations in HAE UAV reconnaissance necessitate more direct human involvement in the aircraft control process than is currently acknowledged or allowed. A state of the art mission planning software package, OPUS, is used to demonstrate the current capability of conventional mission planning systems.