A Mission Management Framework for Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles

Unmanned Autonomous Vehicles (UAVs) are increasingly deployed for missions that are deemed dangerous or impractical to perform by humans in many military and disaster scenarios. UAVs in a team need to operate in sub-groups or independently to perform specific tasks, but still synchronise state information regularly and cope with intermittent communication failures as well as permanent UAV failures. This paper describes a failure management scheme that copes with failures, which may result in disjoint sub-networks within the team. A communication management protocol is proposed to control UAVs performing disconnected individual operations, while maintaining the team's structure by trying to ensure that all members of the mission rendezvous to communicate at intermittent intervals. The evaluation of the proposed approaches shows that the schemes are scalable and perform significantly better than similar centralised approaches.