Description

Multi-Vehicle Health Management by Josh Redding and Brett Bethke

Coordinated multi-vehicle autonomous systems have the potential to provide incredible functionality, but off-nominal conditions and degraded system components can render this capability ineffective. This research effort is focused on developing techniques to improve mission-level functional reliability through better system self-awareness and adaptive mission planning. This extends the traditional definition of health management, which has historically referred to the process of actively monitoring and managing vehicle sub-systems (e.g., avionics) in the event of component failures, to the context of multiple vehicle operations and autonomous multi-agent teams. In this case, health management information about each mission system component is used to improve the mission system's self-awareness and adapt vehicle, guidance, task and mission plans. As discussed in the following, the focus of our work has been on establishing the theoretical foundations of health-aware task planning, developing tractable solution algorithms to the resulting optimizations, and using a unique multi-UAV testbed called RAVEN to experimentally demonstrate the benefits of the new approach.

Related publications

• J. Redding, Z. Dydek, J. How, M. Vavrina, and J. Vian, ''Proactive Planning for Persistent Missions using Composite Model-Reference Adaptive Control and Approximate Dynamic Programming,'' American Control Conference, 2011 (Submitted)
• B. Bethke, J. Redding, J. How, M. Vavrina, and J. Vian, ''Agent Capability in Persistent Mission Planning using Approximate dynamic programming,'' American Control Conference, 2010
• S. Ponda, J. Redding, H.-L. Choi, J. P. How, M. A. Vavrina, and J. Vian, ''Decentralized Planning for Complex Missions with Dynamic Communication Constraints,'' American Control Conference, 2010
• J. Redding, A. Geramifard, A. Undurti, H.-L. Choi and J. P. How, ''An Intelligent Cooperative Control Architecture,'' American Control Conference, 2010
• J. Redding, B. Bethke, L. Bertuccelli, J. How, ''Experimental Demonstration of Exploration toward Model Learning under an Adaptive MDP-based Planner,'' AIAA Infotech@Aerospace Conference, 2009
• B. Bethke, J. How, J. Vian, ''Multi-UAV Persistent Surveillance With Communication Constraints and Health Management,'' AIAA Guidance Navigation and Control Conference, 2009
• B. Bethke, J. How, J. Vian, ''Group Health Management of UAV Teams With Applications to Persistent Surveillance,'' American Control Conference, 2008

Related links

• MIT SWARM Health Management Project