About

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

• Redding, J., Dydek, Z., How, J. P., Vavrina, M., and Vian, J., “Proactive Planning for Persistent Missions using Composite Model-Reference Adaptive Control and Approximate Dynamic Programming,” American Control Conference (ACC), 2011, pp. 2332–2337.
• Bethke, B., Redding, J., How, J., Vavrina, M., and Vian, J., “Agent Capability in Persistent Mission Planning using Approximate Dynamic Programming,” American Control Conference (ACC), Baltimore, MD: 2010.
• Ponda, S. S., Redding, J., Choi, H.-L., How, J. P., Vavrina, M. A., and Vian, J., “Decentralized Planning for Complex Missions with Dynamic Communication Constraints,” American Control Conference (ACC), Baltimore, MD: 2010.
• Redding, J., Geramifard, A., Undurti, A., Choi, H., and How, J., “An Intelligent Cooperative Control Architecture,” American Control Conference (ACC), Baltimore, MD: 2010, pp. 57–62.
• Bethke, B., How, J. P., and Vian, J., “Multi-UAV Persistent Surveillance With Communication Constraints and Health Management,” AIAA Guidance, Navigation, and Control Conference (GNC), 2009.
• Bethke, B., How, J. P., and Vian, J., “Group health management of UAV teams with applications to persistent surveillance,” American Control Conference (ACC), Seattle, WA: 2008, pp. 3145–3150.