Architecture for the Automatic Generation of Plans for Multiple UAS from a Generic Mission Description

Abstract

A planning approach for a platform composed of multiple unmanned aerial systems is presented in this paper. The research activities are focused on the interoperability, task allocation and task planning problems within the system. In order to tackle with the interoperability problem between the vehicles of the platform and other external systems, C-BML has been chosen as the standard language to formalize the description of the missions. Regarding the planning problems involved, several planners have been applied to solve them: a task allocation planner to create an initial assignment of tasks to vehicles, a symbolic planner for high-level reasoning and tools for geometric reasoning. The main contribution of the paper is the use of consolidated task planning techniques to automatically generate low-level plans from a mission described in C-BML, filling the gap between interoperability and automatic plan generation for missions where multiple heterogeneous aerial platforms are involved. The approach has been tested in missions involving multiple surveillance and 3D map generation tasks and the paper includes experimental results.