Complex task allocation in mixed-initiative delegation: A UAV case study

Abstract

Unmanned aircraft systems (UAS's) are now becoming technologically mature enough to be integrated into civil society. An essential issue is principled mixed-initiative interaction between UAS's and human operators. Two central problems are to specify the structure and requirements of complex tasks and to assign platforms to these tasks. We have previously proposed Task Specification Trees (TST's) as a highly expressive specification language for complex multi-agent tasks that supports mixed-initiative delegation and adjustable autonomy. The main contribution of this paper is a sound and complete distributed heuristic search algorithm for allocating the individual tasks in a TST to platforms. The allocation also instantiates the parameters of the tasks such that all the constraints of the TST are satisfied. Constraints are used to model dependencies between tasks, resource usage as well as temporal and spatial requirements on complex tasks. Finally, we discuss a concrete case study with a team of unmanned aerial vehicles assisting in a challenging emergency situation. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2012.