Urdarbrunnen: Towards an AI-enabled mission system
for Combat Search and Rescue operations
Ella Olsson
1,∗
Mikael Nilsson
2,∗
Kristoffer Bergman
3,∗
Daniel de Leng
2,4,∗
Stefan Carlén
2
Emil Karlsson
2
Bo Granbom
2,†
Abstract— The Urdarbrunnen project is a Saab-led ex-
ploratory initiative that aims to develop an operator-assisted
AI-enabled mission system for basic autonomous functions. In
its first iteration, presented in this project paper, the system
is designed to be capable of performing the search task of a
combat search and rescue mission in a complex and dynamic
environment, while providing basic human machine interaction
support for remote operators. The system enables a team of
agents to cooperatively plan and execute a search mission while
also interfacing with the WARA-PS core system that allows
human operators and other agents to monitor activities and
interact with each other. The aim of the project is to develop the
system iteratively, with each iteration incorporating feedback
from simulations and real-world experiments. In future work,
the capability of the system will be extended to incorporate
additional tasks for other scenarios, making it a promising
starting point for the integration of autonomous capabilities
in a future air force.
I. INTRODUCTION
Having rapidly progressed from expensive and custom-
made hardware solutions to commercially-available off-the-
shelf products, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), colloqui-
ally referred to as ‘drones’, are becoming an increasingly
common sight in today’s airspace. These vehicles are often
part of unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) that can be used for
a wide variety of tasks, both civil and military, ranging from
camera shoots for movies and consumer product deliveries to
improvised or specialized weapon platforms as observed in
the Russian Federation’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. The
latter has shown that these type new technologies are crucial
in today’s combat environment which motivates further long-
term investments in innovative research [1].
The prevalence of UAVs in civilian applications is also
resulting in the evolution of airspace management, with the
European Union’s U-Space airspace initiative [2] expected to
come into effect soon—thereby opening up novel opportuni-
ties for European business sectors—and autonomous airport
solutions to accommodate them. On the other hand, the ease
with which private actors can acquire and operate UAVs has
resulted in new security challenges that also affect protected
areas of national interest such as airports and power plants.
1
Saab AB, Nettovägen 6, SE-175 41 Järfälla, Sweden.
2
Saab AB, Bröderna Ugglas Gata, SE-581 88 Linköping, Sweden.
3
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden AB, Fridtunagatan 41, SE-582 16
Linköping, Sweden.
4
Department of Computer and Information Science, Linköping Univer-
sity, SE-581 83 Linköping, Sweden.
∗
These authors contributed equally.
†
Corresponding author: bo.granbom@saabgroup.com
Fig. 1. An illustration of actors in a Combat Search and Rescue scenario,
including a mission commander and a number of autonomous UAV agents
performing a collaborative search. The background environment in the figure
is courtesy of WARA-PS.
Saab is a Swedish security and defense company that
strives to keep society and people safe [3]. In furtherance
of this goal, Saab is the producer of defense and security
products and services, including Saab’s Gripen fighter jet
[4].
In this document we use the term Tactical Autonomy
which we define as a technology that relate to functions
that jointly and independently aim to fulfil a mission goal
through the selection of different courses of action based
on intrinsic knowledge and understanding of the situation
and itself, as well as the predicted outcomes and associated
constraints, such as risk acceptance, available resources, etc.
Collaboration and teaming with human operators, as well as
with other autonomous functions (multi-agent collaboration)
is an essential part of the technology area.
There is an emergence of tactical autonomy solutions
within the air domain, and in particular for UAS. It is envi-
sioned that these solutions have the potential to drastically
change the way security and defense are ensured. These
systems have the potential of acting as a force multiplier in
the areas of security and defense, especially in mixed teams
consisting of autonomous agents and skilled humans. This is
not a new idea either; UAS have already been demonstrated
to be useful in civilian search and rescue (SAR) scenarios,
with the Hybrid Deliberative/Reactive (HDRC3) framework
[5] and related WASP Research Arena for Public Safety
(WARA-PS) Core System [6] being among the pioneering
research in that area.
