Hierarchical Architecture for Coordinating Ground Vehicles in Unstructured Environments

This article presents a hierarchy of planners that can be used to coordinate multiple autonomous vehicles for different applications. The particular architecture reduces complexity and creates a constrained representation that in turn generates a wide variety of complex behaviors. This article will concentrate on the upper levels of the hierarchy assuming that the autonomous mobility tasks can be executed by the lower levels of the hierarchy. A particular set of examples for the US Army's Demo III project will be presented.