State-of-the-Art in UVs’ Autonomous Mission Planning and Task Managing Approach

Abstract

The purpose of this chapter is to review some of the recent advancements in the autonomous mission management and mission planning systems in UV studies concentrating on UAVs and AUVs individual and swarm operations. In recent years, increasing attention has been concentrated on extending the ranges of missions and UVs’ endurance, increasing UVs’ applicability, improving vehicles’ autonomy to manage longer missions without human guidance, and decreasing operating costs and many other aspects of autonomy (Hobson et al. IEEE/OES conference, AUVs, pp 1–8, 2012). Apparently, having the common ground condition(s) is an essential requirement for comparing or judging the level of autonomy achieved by various studies in the scope. A standard autonomous mission management system involves some components such as: Mission planning component, which includes task/resource allocation mechanism, action prioritizing process, and planning a general overview of the vehicle(s) motion in the terrain. Mission execution, which includes procedures such as navigation, trajectory planning, task execution, intelligent action selection. Mission monitoring including SA, mission progress evaluation, and anomaly detection. Mission re-planning procedures such as re-tasking, resource reallocation, reprioritizing and re-routing.