POINT MUGU, Calif. - The U.S. Navy demonstrated a mission-planning capability that connects human-developed operational plans with autonomous aircraft during the Gray Flag 2026 exercise, using a General Atomics Aeronautical Systems Inc. (GA-ASI) MQ-20 Avenger as a surrogate aircraft.
The Navy's Strike Planning & Execution Systems program office, PMX-281, focused its 10 Sept. demonstration on Collaborative Autonomy Mission Planning (CAMP). The capability translates mission planners' information into a format an autonomous aircraft can use to execute its assigned portion of a larger mission.
Navy mission planners establish aircraft roles, tasks, timing, authorities, and operational limitations through the service's CAMP continuum. CAMP connects that force-level planning process to the information an autonomous aircraft needs.
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Demo details
During the Gray Flag demonstration, an MQ-20 Avenger surrogate received a mission plan and executed the mission. The Navy is using the effort to show how autonomous aircraft can integrate into existing mission-planning workflows rather than requiring operators to develop separate, platform-specific instructions for each autonomous system.
"CAMP is about making autonomy more usable by integrating into mission environments with both manned and unmanned platforms," said Capt. Todd "Toby" Keith, PMX-281 program manager. "This demonstration showed how we can connect the way operators plan missions today in the CMPC with the way autonomous aircraft will execute those missions."
The effort builds on the Navy's broader work to develop interoperable autonomy capabilities. CAMP is intended to provide a common connection between mission-planning systems and the information individual autonomous platforms need to perform assigned tasks, potentially allowing different autonomous aircraft and systems to participate in a common operation.
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NAVAIR's PMA-281 selected General Atomics in April for the Collaborative Autonomy Mission Planning and Debrief project. GA-ASI said the project would extend the Navy's mission-planning software framework to support autonomy-related functions including behavioral tasking, rules of engagement configuration, artificial-intelligence decision thresholds, and mission debrief capabilities.
Avenger platform
The CAMP project uses the MQ-20 Avenger as its demonstration platform. GA-ASI said the aircraft is equipped with Government Reference Implementation autonomy and that the broader effort incorporates electronic warfare, infrared search and track, and multiple communications technologies. The company also said it is integrating CAMP with Navy government simulation environments to support testing and validation of autonomy-enabled mission profiles.
The demonstration builds on the Navy's Experimental Platform for Intelligent Combat (EPIC), which has used live, virtual, and constructive environments to evaluate autonomous vehicle control, mission behaviors, and coordinated operations.
CAMP illustrates an increasingly important systems-integration challenge as autonomous platforms proliferate: connecting force-level mission planning with the platform-level software and data needed to execute those plans.
The approach could let operators focus on mission objectives while giving autonomous systems the structured information they need to perform their assigned roles, reducing the need to translate the same operational plan into different platform-specific formats.
