Group Health Management of strongUAVstrong Teams With Applications to.pdfVIP

Group Health Management of UAV Teams With Applications to Persistent Surveillance Brett Bethke, Jonathan P. How, and John Vian Abstract— Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are well-suited monitoring the health of the vehicle’s own subsystems. For to a wide range of mission scenarios, such as search and rescue, example, sensors may be installed to measure the temperature border patrol, and military surveillance. The complex and dis- and current of electric motors, the effectiveness of the tributed nature of these missions often requires teams of UAVs to work together. Furthermore, overall mission performance vehicle’s control actuators, or the fuel consumption rates can be strongly influenced by vehicle failures or degradations, so in the engine. On a typical UAV, sensors may provide a an autonomous mission system must account for the possibility wealth of data about a large number of vehicle subsystems. of these anomalies if it is to maximize performance. This By making appropriate use of this data, a health-aware paper presents a general health management methodology for autonomous system may be able to achieve a higher level of designing mission systems that can anticipate the negative effects of various types of anomalies on the future mission state overall mission performance, as compared to a non-health- and choose actions that mitigate those effects. The formulation aware system, by making decisions that account for the is then specialized to the problem of providing persistent current capabilities of each agent. For example, in a search surveillance coverage using a group of UAVs, where uncertain and track mission, utilization