To develop an agile, adaptable, and secure platform for the deployment of UAV swarms either autonomously, semi-autonomously, non-autonomously.
The United States Air Force Academy, Computer Science Department (DFCS) has requested that its students develop a platform capable of supporting numerous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV/UAS) synchronously with one another. Since this platform would be designed to theoretically support an unlimited number of UAV’s, the design team will co-opt the word “Swarm” hereafter to denote such a mass of UAV’s. This document remarks on the mission, principles, and requirements for the development of the “Swarm System”. Swarm systems in the DoD could incorporate numerous aircraft and platforms integrating together across services and include a mix of autonomous and manned aircraft. Control over the patterns, location, and abilities of the UAV’s in a swarm is critical in a joint warfighting environment as coalition partners and even sister services might be conducting operations in identical or near airspace or might desire the intelligence provided by the Swarm. The development of a platform for effective Command and Control (C2) of numerous UAV’s integrated with partner’s represents an captures a critical need in current aerospace operations
Members of the team are responsible for documenting their work and citing their sources. Citation will be in MLA format and in the “Citations and Resources” excel document. All code should be pushed to the GitHub repository on a development branch specific to that users assigned specialty. Commit messages should be specific and appropriate. Team members are expected to adhere to the test-driven development methodology and only write enough code to pass the given test cases and take care to not build in extra functionality that is not approved for that sprint. Code will be well commented in accordance with the standard DFCS comment policy, with function and file headers. All code borrowed from other sources is required to be documented with both in line comments as well as in the “Citations and Resources” excel document. The team will utilize the trello board for sprint taskers and move items on the project backlog into the respective categories as the sprints continue. Tasks will be assigned due dates and will communicate progress on tasks to the team at stand ups.