Development of a Concept of Operations for Autonomous Systems

The paper will present the development of a general concept of operations for autonomous systems and robot solutions. A Concept of Operations (ConOps) of a system is a high-level description of how the elements of the system and its environment communicate and collaborate in order to achieve the stated system goals. The ConOps utilizes the capabilities of autonomous systems, different unmanned vehicles and robots and human operators as a joint cognitive system where the tasks of human operators and robots complement each other. It will include planning the mission, setting up the autonomous system operations and possible robots, monitoring the progress of the operation, reacting and adapting to the intermediate results, reacting to unexpected events and finally completing the mission. The general ConOps can be considered as a template, which can be tailored for the specifics of different use cases.