This paper describes the NATO STO IST-179RTG group's efforts to improve interoperability of semi-autonomous unmanned ground vehicles. Through experiments and demonstrations at major events like the European Robotics Hackathon 2021 and the European Land-Robot Trial 2022, a practical application of interoperability standards was investigated in different real-world scenarios, demonstrating both current capabilities and potential areas of improvement. This paper was originally presented at the NATO Science and Technology Organization Symposium (ICMCIS) organized by the Information Systems Technology (IST) Panel, IST-209RSY - the ICMCIS, held in Oeiras, Portugal, 13-14 May 2025

Testing and performance analysis for outdoor field robots can be quite challenging, as environmental conditions cannot be completely controlled. In this paper, we present the Field Test Tool, a free, open source framework for logging, annotating, and automatically generating reports of field trials for autonomous ground vehicles. The Field Test Tool integrates a database, an automatic report generator, a web server, an interface for the Robot Operating System, and a web-based user interface. The reporting tool was successfully deployed and used during the European Robotics Hackathon 2021 for a mobile robot performing a navigation task.

This paper describes the research and experiment efforts of the NATO STO group IST-149-RTG capability concept demonstrator for interoperability within unmanned ground systems and C2 and the NAAG team of experts on UGV. The main purpose of the group was to investigate possible standards for controlling UGVs and tests them in a real world scenario. The efforts have been two folded, where the first effort was two NATO groups having an experiment demonstrating interoperability between the UGVs and OCUs available within the group. The Belgium contribution is done in the EU project ICARUS. Both efforts used the Joint Architecture for Unmanned Systems (JAUS) with the interoperability profile (IOP) to successfully enable interoperability between the systems. The trials showed that it is possible to extend the systems quite easily and achieve compliance with parts of the standard in a relatively short time.

Coalition or Joint Forces operations involving multiple countries utilizing Net-Centric Warfare (NCW) is the need and trend of the modern battlefield. These heterogeneous forces have heterogeneous equipments adhering to their country's standards and specifications. This pushes for systems-of-systems interoperability to allow multinational manning of platforms operating within a combined command structure. The next generation coalition environment requires sharing of equipment, data and resources using an interoperable command, control, communications, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (C4ISR) infrastructure. The evolution of military sensor technologies at an unprecedented rate requires the use of various existing sub-systems, Commercial off-the-Shelf (COTS) as well as Internet-of-Things (IoT) sensors due their inherent advantages. The data from these entities needs to be exchanged flawlessly so that the best Common Operational Picture (COP) of the battlefield can be presented to the command structure for taking the correct action. In this paper, we present an approach towards achieving programmatic, constructional and operational interoperabilty for NATO C4ISR infrastructure using the NATO Generic Vehicle Architecture (NGVA), Robotics and Autonomous Systems Ground (RAS-G) Interoperability Profiles (IOPs) and Multilateral Interoperability Programme (MIP) standards to support the future coalition battlefields. It allows the NATO military land system vehicles to be able to exchange control and command with the Unmanned Vehicles (UxVs) in turn, allow the exchange of data with higher echelons like command centres without any dependencies and bottlenecks.

The battlefield scenarios are changing around the world presenting new challenges for the military. Battlefield environments have moved from the open to urban and constricted spaces forcing the military to adopt new doctrines and tactics for effective attack and defence. Whilst there have been many advances at the equipment level to support the ground forces i.e. the evolution of military vehicles and the introduction of robotic systems, there still exists a big gap in making these two entities work together. This gap also makes the idea of achieving a fully functional Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) environment less feasible. The data collected by the vehicles and robots need to be exchanged flawlessly so that the best operational picture of the battlefield can be presented to the ground forces for taking the correct action. Since the military operations nowadays require multinational forces conducting operations together, it is essential that the equipments from various countries are able to interoperate with each other in a coalition environment. Furthermore, the range of legacy sensors and other sub-systems available need to be interoperable with the new vehicles and robots to provide the teeth to the military for conducting operations. In order to support NATO military land vehicles for standardisation and interoperability, the NATO Generic Vehicle Architecture (NGVA) proposes an open architecture approach to land vehicle platform design and integration. The Robotics and Autonomous Systems Ground (RAS-G) Interoperability Profiles (IOPs) from the US Army, on the other hand, describe hardware and software interfaces for Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGVs). In this paper, we present an approach towards achieving interoperability between the NGVA and IOP to support the future coalition battlefields. It allows the NGVA-based military land vehicles to be able to control UGVs and allows the exchange of ISR and other required data without any dependencies and bottlenecks.

This tutorial chapter describes how to set up a multi-robot system in ROS with the multimaster_fkie package. The package adds ROS support for multiple hosts, which can be added and removed from the network at any time without affecting the remaining nodes. The presented multi-master extension works with the unmodified ROS master and does not change the way ROS nodes communicate or establish connections with each other. Thus, the multi-robot system remains fully compatible with a single-master ROS system. It is easy to set up and execute the ROS masters independently on each robot. The multi-master extension takes care of synchronization and merges the masters into a unified network view. For better usability, the package includes a graphical user interface for monitoring, configuration and control of the ROS components. The latest version can be downloaded from https://github.com/fkie/multimaster_fkie. You can also install the package from http://packages.ros.org. The multimaster_fkie package works with all ROS versions since groovy.

Bolstering up a military unit, e.g., an infantry platoon on a recce mission, by robots often is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the robots are able to support the soldiers in multiple ways, they can transport bulky equipment, they can enter risky spots, and they may have sensor suits that help to detect dangers of all kinds. On the other hand, robots need to be equipped with energy sources that are cumbersome by themselves. In addition, the robots must be commanded. In order to optimize the support for their unit, it is often necessary to have a team of heterogeneous robots, e.g., UAVs as well as UGVs all with different sensors and specific abilities. Such a team, however, is even harder to command than a team of homogeneous robots. Our research aims at simplifying commanding teams of heterogeneous robots. In order to achieve this aim, we use the standards BML (Battle Management Language) and ROS (Robot Operating System) to communicate with the robot team. BML is used since our approach to commanding robots is from the language point of view very similar to commanding simulated units. Thus, we use language constructions modeled on those we developed as part of the NATO research groups on BML, NATO MSG-048 and NATO MSG-085. Currently, we are testing to use one single mobile GUI, also modeled on our NATO research groups’ results. That GUI is implemented on a tablet and enables the controller to command a team of two UAVs and four UGVs. All the robots can be equipped with different sensor suits. This article presents our solutions about the following topics essential for the described challenge. First, the robots have to introduce themselves by communicating their current abilities and their status to the commander. Second, the commander gives the commands to the robot team in a mission kind fashion. Thus, third, there has to be a kind of intelligence in the robot team that calculates sub tasks out of a given command and distributes these sub tasks to the team members taking the members’ specific abilities into account. Fourth, the robot team has to fuse sensor data in order to send a unified picture back to the commander in order to contribute to the operational picture.

Using a multi-robot system in military operations poses many control problems. The ability to formulate clear and unambiguous commands for the robots thus is extremely desirable. As numerous autonomous functions have been developed both for single robots and for multirobot systems, we want the operator to express just what needs to be done, whereas the robots have to figure out how to do it. Therefore, we use the Battle Management Language (BML) to command multi-robot systems. As BML has been developed by the military research community, it is – as required – designed to express short, unambiguous orders readable by both humans and machines. This article presents an overview over the BML commands that can be given to the robots as well as an overview over the BML reports generated by robots and presented to the operator.

The paper presents the results of cooperative work done by three different research institutions. The cooperation concluded in a large field experiment with six heterogeneous unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). It is shown, that it is possible to do reconnaissance and surveillance, namely detection of pedestrians and vehicles, with an autonomous multi-robot system under real world conditions. The participants were all using different robotic middlewares and interfaces to the graphical user interface. Hence, it has been agreed to use common interfaces and standards for communication. The Robot Operating System (ROS) is used as a communication layer, supported by commercially available 3G mobile radio communication for large operating distances. A standardized markup language has been used for the description of tasks and feedback from the robots to the control station. Moreover, the applied UGV control strategies and the implemented approach for detection, tracking and classification are presented. The concluding field test showed that it is possible to realize a multi-robot system of dynamic size, and that such teams are well-suited to perform reconnaissance and surveillance without constant observation by a human operator.

Multi-Robot Systems have become an important research topic. One of the main questions, when looking at usability of a MRS, is how it can be controlled. In this paper we describe an approach were the commanding is done by using an artificial language very similar to English, the Battle Management Language (BML). The orders can thus be created intuitively and on a high abstraction level. We developed a GUI to allow fast and efficient creating of orders for the robots system. On the robots we used the Robot Operating System (ROS). The interpretation and execution of the orders are controlled by ROS nodes. We created control nodes for every robot which handle the execution of a task for a single robot. We also created intelligent nodes for groups of robots. These nodes handle commands directed to a group of robots and split that BML order into BML orders for each robot. These orders are sent to the control nodes and executed by the robots. ROS provides numerous of libraries and tools which helps to create new robot applications. We mainly used the publish subscriber based communication capabilities. In this paper we concentrated on the architecture and how the translation of BML orders into basic ROS command is done and how feedback messages were sent back to the C2 System. This presented work is the result of cooperation between the Real Time Systems Group (RTS), Leibniz Universität Hannover, the Institute of Real-Time Learning Systems (EZLS), University of Siegen and the Fraunhofer Institute for Communication, Information Processing and Ergonomics.

The paper presents work that has been done by three different research institutions. The aim was to realize an autonomous team of heterogeneous unmanned ground and aerial vehicles performing certain reconnaissance and surveillance tasks, where the tasks were set by an operator at a team level instead of controlling each vehicle seperately. To overcome the lack of a common middleware, the interfaces between vehicles and graphical user interface have been defined using Robot Operating System (ROS) and Battle Management Language (BML). We present approaches for autonomous control of the vehicles, focussing on the unmanned ground vehicle. Moreover, we conducted some large field experiments and present the results.

Multi-robot systems, i.e. groups of mobile robots which carry out complex tasks cooperatively, are becoming increasingly important in robotics research.For many applications, like exploration or search and rescue missions, multi-robot systems have great advantages over single robot solutions.Besides their ability to fulfill missions faster, multi-robot systems offer improved fault tolerance and the opportunity to combine a large number of relatively cheap robotic systems with complementary capabilities.For the successful deployment of a multi-robot system, reliable wireless communication plays an important role.Especially if an operator is in the loop, the ability to communicate to every robot at any time can be vital.This article presents a technique to predict the expected signal strength of the wireless communication between mobile robots, based on parametric models of radio wave propagation.The predictor allows to take information about the expected future communication quality into account during mission planning and helps to increase the robustness of navigation strategies for multi-robot systems with respect to communication-loss this way.The presented signal strength predictor adjusts itself on-line to different operation environments and robotic systems being used.

Multi-robot systems obtain their performance advantages from close collaboration of the participating robot systems. As the demand for such cooperation increases, the aspect of wireless communication is getting more and more important. To cope with the challenges of the wireless communication we propose an easy to use communication framework for a multi-robot system. This framework is designed for wireless networks, therefore it expects unreliable communication and can even cope with complete network separations. Using multicast as the default communication scheme, the framework can directly benefit from the broadcast nature of the wireless medium if such an optimisation is supported by the lower network protocols. We therefore introduce our multicast capable wireless routing protocol, which supports this optimisation. The software is implemented and frequently used in our experimental multi-robot system.

Multi robot systems (MRS) have been an active research area for many years. With the robot systems leaving the laboratory environment, the aspect of wireless communication is getting more important. Especially in multi robot systems wireless communication is crucial, but existing middleware for robot systems does not regard the challenges of wireless communication. Among other aspects the fluctuation of link delay, bandwidth and availability is characteristic for wireless communication. A communication system in a multi robot system must be capable to manage these challenges. Another issue is efficient point to multipoint (multicast) communication. This allows the availability of the same data to multiple recipients without an unnecessary high increase of network load compared to unicast communication schemes. We therefore propose a multicast communication framework for a multi robot system based on wireless communication. The framework is organised in two parts. The first part is a general framework for a wireless multicast communication protocol, which is optimized to offer efficient multicast communication capabilities on wireless networks and takes the available link qualities into account. The second part is a framework for a robot middleware, which benefits from the multicast communication optimizations of the first part. The framework assumes unreliable communication, thus taking fluctuating link qualities into account. Both parts are already implemented on a real system and are used in an experimental multi robot system.

In this paper an experimental framework called V;Net for forwarding data frames in a wireless mobile ad hoc network is presented. The approach is based on the principles of the OLSR protocol but is implemented as a forwarding protocol on the MAC layer. One focus of the framework is the support of efficient multicast communication. The design allows extensions concerning quality and priority based forwarding, quality of service, congestion management, power awareness and security.Since the framework is positioned on the MAC layer, it has direct access to device parameters and can therefore determine link and node attributes. These are used to calculate link qualities that influence the forwarding decision, leading to a quality-based routing mechanism.

: Bolstering up a military unit, e.g., an infantry platoon on a recce mission, by robots often is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the robots are able to support the soldiers in multiple ways, they can transport bulky equipment, they can enter risky spots, and they may have sensor suits that help to detect dangers of all kinds. On the other hand, robots need to be equipped with energy sources that are cumbersome by themselves. In addition, the robots must be commanded. In order to optimize the support for their unit, it is often necessary to have a team of heterogeneous robots, e.g., UAVs as well as UGVs all with different sensors and specific abilities. Such a team, however, is even harder to command than a team of homogeneous robots. Our research aims at simplifying commanding teams of heterogeneous robots. In order to achieve this aim, we use the standards BML (Battle Management Language) and ROS (Robot Operating System) to communicate with the robot team. BML is used since our approach to commanding robots is from the language point of view very similar to commanding simulated units. Thus, we use language constructions modeled on those we developed as part of the NATO research groups on BML, NATO MSG-048 and NATO MSG-085. Currently, we are testing to use one single mobile GUI, also modeled on our NATO research groups results. That GUI is implemented on a tablet and enables the controller to command a team of two UAVs and four UGVs. All the robots can be equipped with different sensor suits.