A Mission Management Framework for Unmanned Autonomous
Vehicles
Eskindir Asmare, Anandha Gopalan,
Morris Sloman, Naranker Dulay and
Emil Lupu
Abstract:
Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed for
missions that are deemed dangerous or impractical to perform by humans
in many military and disaster scenarios. UAVs in a team need to operate
in sub-groups or independently to perform specific tasks, but still
synchronise state information regularly and cope with intermittent
communication failures as well as permanent UAV failures. This paper
describes a failure management scheme that copes with failures, which
may result in disjoint sub-networks within the team. A communication
management protocol is proposed to control UAVs performing disconnected
individual operations, while maintaining the team's structure by trying
to ensure that all members of the mission rendezvous to communicate at
intermittent intervals. The evaluation of the proposed approaches shows
that the schemes are scalable and perform significantly better than
similar centralised approaches.