Integrated UGV and UAV Autonomy for Urban Area Peace Enforcement

This paper describes the development of intelligent agents in Soar to exercise a group of communicating Unmanned Ground Vehicles (UGV’s) and Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAV’s) patrolling a representative network of roads in an urban peace keeping environment. The scenario features up to 6 ground vehicles undertaking a routine patrol and encountering threat regions. The UGV’s can be accompanied by up to 4 airborne surveillance UAV’s. No direct human components or intervention is considered at this stage, i.e. it has fully autonomous operation for the purposes of the simulation. The task for the vehicles is to work cooperatively to investigate the threat regions whilst dynamically re-routing around any blocked streets that may be encountered as the simulation proceeds. The study has served to provide a working illustration of some basic principles and possibilities for integrated teamwork of unmanned ground and air vehicles.