Two Major Architectures for Unmanned Systems-STANAG 4586 and JAUS

Unmanned vehicles are changing the way military and civil operations are carried out. They are highly complex systems and are required to execute several tasks concurrently, while monitoring and managing unexpected events. These systems typically integrate several sensors and actuators. Although many standards have been proposed, most of these systems have their own command and reporting protocols, and consequently require their own ground control stations. This profusion of protocols makes it very difficult to implement integration and cooperation between systems and difficult the training of ground control station operation. A common solution is to develop wrappers and gateways from one system to another. This solution is generally sub-optimal in characteristics, and computationally inefficient. There has been a lot of development in this area, and many different frameworks and standards have emerged to address various needs that developers have felt.
This paper discusses two major architectures for unmanned systems STANAG 4586 (Standard Interfaces of UAV Control System for NATO UAV Interoperability) and JAUS (Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems).