Achieving Resiliency and Behavior Assurance in Autonomous Navigation: An Industry Perspective

In this article, we present an industry perspective on key drivers for autonomous navigation, with a particular focus on resiliency and behavior assurance. We provide a brief survey of current deployed mobile autonomous systems and their capabilities (with a primary focus on the air domain but including other domains-underwater, ground, space, and surface-as well). We discuss techniques that are currently used for achieving resiliency and assurance in autonomous navigation, pointing out some of the shortcomings of these techniques. We describe techniques under development in the industry that aims to overcome these shortcomings by combining emerging approaches to resilient behavior with assured autonomous behavior constructs to yield reliable and mission-effective systems necessary to operate successfully in dynamic and adversarial environments. We briefly discuss ongoing efforts to develop multidomain standards that are designed to be applicable across these disparate vehicle domains.