Specification Of Missions Research Articles

The Scientific Exploitation of PAZ mission: PAZ Ciencia objectives and status

The paper provides and up-to-date overview of the science activities of the Spanish PAZ SAR mission. PAZ Science activities, coordinated by the Spanish National Institute of Aerospace Technology (INTA) has as purpose to strengthen the use and improvement of SAR technology in all its areas, from the specification of new SAR missions, SAR engineering, development of new algorithms and promotion of applications based on the use of SAR products and derived variables. In order to achieve these objectives and in addition to the activities carried out in INTA, the science PAZ program (called PAZ Ciencia) started in 2019, providing PAZ scientific products to research teams as basis and support to their SAR-related projects.

Towards an integrated automatic design process for robot swarms.

Background: The specification of missions to be accomplished by a robot swarm has been rarely discussed in the literature: designers do not follow any standardized processes or use any tool to precisely define a mission that must be accomplished. Methods: In this paper, we introduce a fully integrated design process that starts with the specification of a mission to be accomplished and terminates with the deployment of the robots in the target environment. We introduce Swarm Mission Language (SML), a textual language that allows swarm designers to specify missions. Using model-driven engineering techniques, we define a process that automatically transforms a mission specified in SML into a configuration setup for an optimization-based design method. Upon completion, the output of the optimization-based design method is an instance of control software that is eventually deployed on real robots. Results: We demonstrate the fully integrated process we propose on three different missions. Conclusions: We aim to show that in order to create reliable, maintainable and verifiable robot swarms, swarm designers may benefit from following standardised automatic design processes that will facilitate the design of control software in all stages of the development.

Towards an integrated automatic design process for robot swarms

Background: The specification of missions to be accomplished by a robot swarm has been rarely discussed in the literature: designers do not follow any standardized processes or use any tool to precisely define a mission that must be accomplished. Methods: In this paper, we introduce a fully integrated design process that starts with the specification of a mission to be accomplished and terminates with the deployment of the robots in the target environment. We introduce Swarm Mission Language (SML), a textual language that allows swarm designers to specify missions. Using model-driven engineering techniques, we define a process that automatically transforms a mission specified in SML into a configuration setup for an optimization-based design method. Upon completion, the output of the optimization-based design method is an instance of control software that is eventually deployed on real robots. Results: We demonstrate the fully integrated process we propose on three different missions. Conclusions: We aim to show that in order to create reliable, maintainable and verifiable robot swarms, swarm designers need to follow standardised automatic design processes that will facilitate the design of control software in all stages of the development.

Adopting MDE for Specifying and Executing Civilian Missions of Mobile Multi-Robot Systems

Robots are meant to replace humans for a broad variety of everyday tasks, such as environmental monitoring or patrolling large public areas for security assurance. The main focus of researchers and practitioners has been on providing tailored software and hardware solutions for very specific and often complex tasks. On one hand, these solutions show great potential and provide advanced capabilities for solving the specific task. On the other hand, the polarized attention to task-specific solutions makes them hard to reuse, customize, and combine. In this paper we propose a family of domain-specific modeling languages for the specification of civilian missions of mobile multi-robot systems. These missions are meant to be described in terms of models that are: 1) closer to the general problem domain; 2) independent from the underlying technologies; 3) ready to be analyzed, simulated, and executed; and 4) extensible to new application domains, thus opening up the use of robots to even non-technical operators. Moreover, we show the applicability of the proposed family of languages in two real-world application domains: unmanned multicopters and autonomous underwater vehicles.

High-Level Mission Specification and Planning for Collaborative Unmanned Aircraft Systems Using Delegation

Automated specification, generation and execution of high level missions involving one or more heterogeneous unmanned aircraft systems is in its infancy. Much previous effort has been focused on the development of air vehicle platforms themselves together with the avionics and sensor subsystems that implement basic navigational skills. In order to increase the degree of autonomy in such systems so they can successfully participate in more complex mission scenarios such as those considered in emergency rescue that also include ongoing interactions with human operators, new architectural components and functionalities will be required to aid not only human operators in mission planning, but also the unmanned aircraft systems themselves in the automatic generation, execution and partial verification of mission plans to achieve mission goals. This article proposes a formal framework and architecture based on the unifying concept of delegation that can be used for the automated specification, generation and execution of high-level collaborative missions involving one or more air vehicles platforms and human operators. We describe an agent-based software architecture, a temporal logic-based mission specification language, a distributed temporal planner and a task specification language that when integrated provide a basis for the generation, instantiation and execution of complex collaborative missions on heterogeneous air vehicle systems. A prototype of the framework is operational in a number of autonomous unmanned aircraft systems developed in our research lab.