Network enabled cooperation of autonomous vehicles: A communications perspective

In this paper we present the NECSAVE system which allows the control of heterogeneous unmanned vehicles under challenging environments by a single human operator by providing it with the desired highlevel objectives. The described software stack takes care of decomposing the high-level objectives into assignable tasks and (re)distributing the workload among team members according to their announced capabilities and eventual failures. NECSAVE is robust to system failures by supporting decentralized planning and adapting allocation in face of platform losses. The system was validated in multiple field trials where NECSAVE was used for the coordination of heterogeneous vehicles under challenged communication environments, namely the sea using radio (at surface) and acoustic communications (underwater).

[1]  Tor Arne Johansen,et al.  EUROPtus: A Mixed-Initiative Controller for Multi-vehicle Oceanographic Field Experiments , 2016, ISER.

[2]  João Borges de Sousa,et al.  Mission planning and specification in the Neptus framework , 2006, Proceedings 2006 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation, 2006. ICRA 2006..

[3]  Marc Shapiro,et al.  CRDTs: Consistency without concurrency control , 2009, ArXiv.

[4]  Kazuya Yoshida,et al.  Collaborative mapping of an earthquake‐damaged building via ground and aerial robots , 2012, J. Field Robotics.

[5]  Lukás Chrpa,et al.  On mixed-initiative planning and control for Autonomous underwater vehicles , 2015, 2015 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS).

[6]  Paul Newman.  MOOS - Mission Orientated Operating Suite , 2008 .