Cooperating unmanned vehicles

Abstract

Effective employment of autonomous multi-vehicle control can meet a critical need in today's military. Swarming unmanned ground and aerial vehicles can achieve militarily effective cooperative action autonomously, using reactive, effects-based behaviors and broadcast-only, decentralized communications. We achieve this control through stigmergic potential fields, a form of cooperative motor schema behavior based upon mathematical functions that are associated with entities in the operational environment of the vehicle. We have demonstrated empirically, as well as through hardware-in-the-loop testing, how reactive swarming behaviors using stigmergic potential fields can offer robustly sufficient behavior with improved total system survivability and total operational effectiveness, particularly under dynamic environmental and operational conditions. © 2005 IEEE.