Preliminary Experimental Results of Context-Aware Teams of Multiple Autonomous Agents Operating under Constrained Communications

TL;DR

This paper introduces a layered framework for autonomous teams of small UAVs operating under constrained communications, demonstrating real-time coordination for search, monitoring, and complex behavior detection in open areas.

Contribution

It presents a novel three-layered architecture for autonomous UAV teams with an ad-hoc communication network, enabling real-time decision-making under communication constraints.

Findings

Successful real-time operation of 10 UAVs in search and monitoring tasks.

Effective coordination across operational, tactical, and strategic layers.

Detection and response to complex behaviors of a target person.

Abstract

This work presents and experimentally test the framework used by our context-aware, distributed team of small Unmanned Aerial Systems (SUAS) capable of operating in real-time, in an autonomous fashion, and under constrained communications. Our framework relies on three layered approach: (1) Operational layer, where fast temporal and narrow spatial decisions are made; (2) Tactical Layer, where temporal and spatial decisions are made for a team of agents; and (3) Strategical Layer, where slow temporal and wide spatial decisions are made for the team of agents. These three layers are coordinated by an ad-hoc, software-defined communications network, which ensures sparse, but timely delivery of messages amongst groups and teams of agents at each layer even under constrained communications. Experimental results are presented for a team of 10 small unmanned aerial systems tasked with searching and monitoring a person in an open area. At the operational layer, our use case presents an agent autonomously performing searching, detection, localization, classification, identification, tracking, and following of the person, while avoiding malicious collisions. At the tactical layer, our experimental use case presents the cooperative interaction of a group of multiple agents that enable the monitoring of the targeted person over a wider spatial and temporal regions. At the strategic layer, our use case involves the detection of complex behaviors-i.e. the person being followed enters a car and runs away, or the person being followed exits the car and runs away-that requires strategic responses to successfully accomplish the mission.