Advanced Technology > ACIS > Intellegent Control Systems (ICS)

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Intelligent Control Systems is ARL’s center for research, architecture development, and prototype design in the area of intelligent autonomy and intelligent control. Applications include Navy undersea systems, shipboard automation to reduce manning, unmanned air, land, undersea, and space vehicles, and netcentric command and control.

One role of an autonomous intelligent controller is to take data streams from a collection of sensing systems and use them to dynamically create and maintain an internal representation of the system’s current external operating environment, its “world model”. That process involves data correlation and fusion, classification and interpretation, and creation of structures for knowledge representation.

A second role of the controller is to execute operations to carry out its current mission given the external environment as specified by the world model. This process involves operational situation assessment, real-time planning, and plan execution. The output of the controller is a set of commands to conventional control systems for actuation, and messages to collaborating autonomous systems and humans.

Resources:

  • 15 highly qualified autonomous controller designers, 3 PhD, 5 MS
  • Network of Sun/Solaris and Intel/Windows PCs
  • Models of continuous logic
  • Development environment for intelligent controllers
  • Environmental Simulations

Current Projects:

  • Net-centric Operations
  • Autonomous Intelligent Weapons
  • Unmanned Air Systems
  • Coordinated Control of Multiple Vehicles
  • Unmanned Underwater Vehicles
  • Collision Avoidance Systems

Areas of Expertise:

  • Intelligent autonomy
  • Adaptive information interpretation
  • Adaptive decision making
  • Information and data fusion
  • Intelligent control architectures
  • Agent communication
  • Continuous logic
  • Dynamic model-based reasoning
  • Modeling structures
  • Machine learning