A COMMON CONTROL LANGUAGE FOR DYNAMIC TASKING OF MULTIPLE AUTONOMOUS VEHICLES

Cooperative behavior, visible in many animal species, is achieved through varying degrees of communication (e.g. chemical clues from ants, a bees “dance”). When looking at military operations, groups communicate. In the networking of computers and their coordination, communication is necessary to achieve goals. In the same way, cooperative behavior for autonomous vehicles will require some level of communication between group members. Both military and scientific concepts for autonomous operations are projecting the use of a variety of heterogeneous platforms in groupoperations in order to address various operating regimes and specialized tasks thus introducing unique issues for coordinated operations. We will provide an overview of a Common Control Language (CCL) approach that is a natural extension of a behavior-based control although not limited to such an implementation. In our efforts to define and design a CCL, we are interested in answering the following questions: Can autonomous group control benefit from a specialized control language? Can we capture a language to support agent coordination? Our approach will center on 3 critical requirements that this language must address: 1) a processdescriptive language to be used by the scheduler of a vehicle controller, 2) a vocabulary that can evolve and grow with new applications but is primarily based on a discrete set of fundamental behaviors and 3) a translation scheme for an operator’s mission specifications.