Service-oriented agent architecture for unmanned air vehicles

Unmanned Air Vehicles (UAVs) are performing more and more sophisticated air missions. Remotely-piloted vehicles are becoming less and less cost-effective. Alternatively, autonomous UAVs have the potential to operate with greatly reduced overhead costs and level of pilot intervention. The challenge is to develop a system that deploys a team of UAVs that can perform complex tasks reliably and with minimal (remote) pilot intervention. New UAV platforms require high degree of autonomy and a collaborative operation mode in order to minimize the human intervention. This paper proposes an Intelligent Vehicle Control Architecture (IVCA) to enable multiple collaborating air vehicles to autonomously carry out airspace missions. The IVCA is generic in nature but aimed at a case study where UAVs are required to work cooperatively. The architectural foundation to achieve the IVCA lays on the flexibility of service-oriented computing and agent software technology. An ontological database captures the remote pilot skills, platform capabilities and, changes in the environment. The information captured enables reasoning agents to plan missions based on the current situation. This makes it possible to develop an IVCA that is able to dynamically reconfigure and adapt itself in order to deal with changes in the operation environment. This paper also presents architectural details and evaluation scenarios of the IVCA, and future research directions.