Local Plan Execution and Repair in a Hierarchical Structure of Sub-Teams of Heterogeneous Autonomous Vehicles

Robots have already reached a high level of autonomy. A robust cooperation in a team of robots would be the next step. In this paper, we consider a mission involving a team of heterogeneous autonomous vehicles, and we propose to make plan-repair as local as possible, in particular to manage the uncertainty on communication availability. For that, we are leaning upon a hierarchical structure of the plan and we have defined an algorithm to automatically extract the team hierarchical structure. This is intended to increase reactivity and efficiency of the team in front of disturbing events at execution time, particularly concerning communication constraints.