Mario Valenti, Brett Bethke, Jonathan P. How, Daniela Pucci de.pdfVIP

Embedding Health Management into Mission Tasking for UAV Teams Mario Valenti, Brett Bethke, Jonathan P. How, Daniela Pucci de Farias, and John Vian Abstract— Coordinated multi-vehicle autonomous systems can provide incredible functionality, but off-nominal conditions and degraded system components can render this capability ineffective. This paper presents techniques to improve mission- level functional reliability through better system self-awareness and adaptive mission planning. In particular, we extend the traditional definition of health management, which has his- torically referred to the process of actively monitoring and managing vehicle sub-systems (e.g., avionics) in the event of component failures, to the context of multiple vehicle opera- tions and autonomous multi-agent teams. In this case, health management information about each mission system component is used to improve the mission system’s self-awareness and adapt vehicle, guidance, task and mission plans. This paper presents the theoretical foundations of our approach and recent Fig.1: Eight autonomous UAVs shown in the MIT RAVEN experimental results on a new UAV testbed. systems are cost effective to operate over the duration of a I. INTRODUCTION mission. While this problem may be formulated as a very Recently, unmanned vehicle mission systems have become large mathematical programming problem, this approach is extremely important in aiding military and civilian organi- likely to be computationally intractable for any computer or zations for gathering information and assessing situations human o