A Distributed Simulation-to-Flight Framework to Support Investigating Trust/Trustworthiness in Multi-Agent Systems

As autonomous systems continue to grow both in use and complexity, the necessity for
robust and extensible simulation-to-flight methods is paramount for establishing an effective
architecture for autonomous systems. A fundamental objective of the ATTRACTOR (Autonomy Teaming and TRAjectories for Complex Trusted Operational Reliability) project was to
design and develop a distributed mixed-reality simulation environment to begin establishing
a basis for certification of autonomous systems via research into trust and trustworthiness.
In this paper, we present an autonomous systems architecture and development framework
paired with a persistent distributed modeling and simulation environment for test and evaluation of autonomous systems. The Autonomous Entity Operations Network (AEON) framework
enables autonomous system development with an easily extensible collection of libraries and
plug-n-play nodes facilitated by the Data Distribution Service (DDS) communication protocol
standard. The Baseline Environment for Autonomous Modeling (BEAM) simulation environment is a distributed mixed-reality Unity™-based environment built around the same DDS
communication paradigm allowing for easy integration with AEON-based autonomous applications. They were designed under ATTRACTOR in order to measure and establish trustworthiness and trust in single- and multi-agent human-machine systems whether these machines
are fixed-wing general aviation, rotary-wing Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), ground rovers,
or even spacecraft. Together AEON and BEAM enable sim-to-flight with minimal configuration changes. By using AEON and BEAM, source code that runs in simulation ports directly
to hardware and has successfully flown in the lab and in the National Airspace System (NAS)
at NASA LaRC many times over the lifetime of ATTRACTOR.