About the National Center for Collaborative Autonomy (NCCA)
The National Center for Collaborative Autonomy is dedicated to scaling the real-world impact of autonomous systems operating across multiple domains (air, land, sea, space, and cyber) by advancing machine–machine and human–machine collaboration.
Over the past decade, advances in robotics and artificial intelligence have successfully moved autonomous systems out of the laboratory and into operational use. Drones, in particular, now play an increasingly prominent role across society, industry, and defense. The global market for aerial drones alone was estimated at $31.7 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to over $91 billion by 2030. Other autonomous platforms, including unmanned maritime systems and unmanned ground vehicles, also represent multi-billion-dollar and rapidly expanding markets.
Yet despite this growth, scaling the value of autonomous systems remains a fundamental challenge. Simply adding more autonomous platforms does not automatically lead to better performance. In fact, without effective collaboration, additional systems can increase complexity, overload communications, and even reduce overall effectiveness. Much like a team where individuals act independently without coordination, autonomy at scale demands more than capability, it demands collaboration.
NCCA exists to address this challenge.
Core Research Areas
To achieve these objectives, NCCA researchers conduct integrated research across several foundational areas:
• Collaborative algorithms for coordinated effects, enabling multiple autonomous agents to work toward shared goals
• Reasoning under uncertainty, allowing systems to make robust decisions with incomplete, noisy, or conflicting information
• Robust execution and performance under environmental and operational uncertainty
• Understanding context and relevance, so systems can identify what information and actions matter most at any given moment
• Flexibility and adaptation, supporting dynamic changes in roles, plans, and team structure
• Human–machine teaming, ensuring autonomous systems align with human intent, judgment, and oversight
• Novel command-and-control paradigms designed specifically for collaborative autonomous systems, rather than traditional centralized control
Together, these areas form a unified approach to collaborative autonomy, one that prioritizes coordination, adaptability, and trust over isolated optimization.
Research Outcomes and Impact
NCCA research enables capabilities essential to unlocking the full potential of autonomous systems at scale, including:
• Improved value-of-information assessment to support better decisions
• Effective distributed decision-making under uncertainty
• Intelligent prioritization of data sharing across teams and domains
• Enhanced and extended human situational awareness
• Robust communications and networking in constrained, degraded, or denied environments
By addressing collaboration as a first-order challenge, NCCA aims to ensure that increasing numbers of autonomous systems translate into increased effectiveness, resilience, and safety, rather than diminishing returns.