Distributed Cooperative Planning for multiple UAVs Based on Agent Negotiation

Aiming to overcome the limitations of centralized planning methods, distributed planning approaches based on agent negotiation are proposed for a team of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) to execute tasks cooperatively. To solve the problem, a two-stage approach is presented. Firstly, contract net protocol is applied, so that UAVs plan independently and negotiate mutually to realize dynamic task allocation. By integrating several types of contracts to work together, task allocation in complex battlefield environment can be solved more efficiently. Secondly, based on the detection of the relations among tasks, a novel compensatory negotiation mechanism is presented to coordinate the task execution process of UAVs whose tasks are correlative. Thus, UAVs can achieve their tasks more effectively with the assistance of others. Finally, simulation results demonstrate the validity of the approach proposed